Many companies that have shifted enterprise-technology tools into the cloud in recent years, in part as a cost-saving measure, say those investments h

CIOs Still Waiting for Cloud Investments to Pay Off

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2022-10-06 20:00:07

Many companies that have shifted enterprise-technology tools into the cloud in recent years, in part as a cost-saving measure, say those investments have yet to pay off.

Katrina Agusti, chief information officer at workwear maker Carhartt Inc., said the company was surprised by the high cost of data storage after it began moving to the cloud in 2018.

Ms. Agusti said storage was cheaper when the Dearborn, Mich., company held data in its own data center. After it began migrating years’ worth of data into the cloud, she said, “what we realized quickly was we weren’t going to be able to contain those costs.”

Cloud computing was initially sold to businesses as a cost-effective way to quickly scale up and down their IT capabilities on an as-needed basis, offering near unlimited computer capacity with a pay-as-you-go pricing model. Rather than run software and systems in their own hardware, commercial cloud users tap computing capabilities from providers such as Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

Companies today are compiling massive amounts of data in cloud storage services, and feeding it into increasingly sophisticated software and analytics tools designed to generate customer and market insights, among other benefits. They are also turning to multiple cloud providers, rather than relying on one cloud, for different systems and applications for different business areas. All of this can run up costs, corporate technology leaders and industry analysts say.

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