The reality of the cloud market is that many organizations find it doesn't live up to their expectations, leading to a growing trend of workloads being repatriated back on-premises or to private cloud environments.
This is according to IDC, which notes that one of the major drivers for cloud adoption was the promise of cost savings, yet many businesses have found themselves spending more on cloud resources than they anticipated.
The market watcher quotes its own survey stats which indicate about half of cloud buyers spent more on cloud than they expected in 2023, with 59 percent of users predicting there will be similar cost overruns during 2024.
Part of the issue here is the complexity of cloud environments, coupled with unforeseen factors that can make it challenging to accurately forecast costs.
This is something The Register has noted before, pointing out that cloud is not necessarily easier to manage than looking after your own infrastructure, and presents a different set of management challenges. This can result in over-provisioning of resources and idle or underutilized assets such as server instances that are still being metered even if they aren't being used.