Businesses are spending over £1bn each year on maintaining cloud services due to hidden costs and teething problems.
According to research from Sungard’s research into cloud services.
Despite being lauded as creating a new era of IT, cloud services are creating a large number of challenges related to managing and operating.
The research has revealed that the majority of businesses in the UK have encountered some form of unplanned cloud spend (87%), which is higher than the European average of 81%.
UK organisations’ are paying an average of £200,000 per year to ensure that cloud services run effectively, but also an additional £270,000 over the past 5 years due to unforeseen costs.
These unforeseen costs have come from having people to manage deployment (44%), internal software maintenance (42%) and systems integration (40%).
With 43% of organisations stating that they had been stung by unplanned spending for costs, questions will be asked of whether vendors are being transparent enough during the initial consultancy phase.
Although 55% stated that IT costs had been reduced, it was found that 28% believe that this not had been achieved.
Surprisingly, the report found that unplanned cloud spend is higher in the UK and France (£275,000 and £430,000 respectively) than it is in Ireland (£150,000) and Sweden (£230,000).
Keith Tilley, Executive Vice President, Global Sales & CSM at Sungard Availability Services, said: "This gap seems to point to the level of market adoption within the regions – with the UK and France investing in cloud services earlier on."
"While Ireland and Sweden have potentially joined the cloud hype phase a little later, where some key learning’s have already been shared more widely across the industry."
The research found that IT complexity for 45% of UK respondents had increased since the implementation of cloud services. While 70% claimed that cloud computing added a new set of IT challenges.
Interoperability between existing IT estates’ and cloud platforms was considered by 42% as the biggest issue.
Tilley, said: "By getting caught up in the hype, some organisations were quick to adopt the cloud without linking it back to their wider business goals and failed to see the additional considerations such as interoperability, availability and the operational expenditure linked to cloud."
"Whilst organisations can indeed see incredible benefits from cloud computing including agility, flexibility and cost savings, the cloud needs to be deployed on a case-by-case basis in line with business goals and the nature of the application or the workload."
"This research shows that organisations no longer need the enthusiasm and jargon of cloud evangelists but require practical advice for building a reliable, robust and available infrastructure – in short, a cloud therapist!"
The research questioned 150 senior IT decision makers in the UK in organisations with more than 500 employees, with an average cloud spend of £700,000 in the last year.
