IT, budgets, costs, money, costs, budget, expense, cost management, spending

A survey of 500 IT decision makers in the U.S. conducted by Wanclouds, a provider of managed services, suggests that spending on cloud services is only going to increase in the coming year. The survey finds a full 89% work for organizations that plan to increase cloud budgets in 2025, with 84% implementing hybrid or multi-cloud strategies.

Additionally, the survey finds more than half (52%) of respondents are hosting most of their AI workloads on private clouds.

Wanclouds CEO Faiz Khan, however, noted that while overall spending is increasing, there is more focus on optimizing costs than ever. The Wanclouds survey finds 61% of respondents expect to be able to use AI to optimize consumption of cloud infrastructure. Cloud infrastructure costs are subject to the same inflationary pressures as any other goods or services, he added.

Of course, much of the increased spending on cloud services is being driven by AI workloads. Given the ongoing scarcity of graphical processor unit (GPU) resources, many organizations are expanding the number of cloud service providers they are willing to engage with to gain access to GPUs, noted Khan.

At the same time, more organizations are also looking for alternatives to GPUs to run some AI workloads at a lower cost, he added.

Thereโ€™s no doubt the overall number of workloads being deployed in the cloud is increasing, but organizations are clearly becoming more comfortable running them across multicloud computing environments that also include on-premises data centers and traditional hosting services.

The challenge is that in many instances organizations are also trying to take advantage of discounts that become steeper as more workloads are deployed on a specific cloud platform. Conversely, not all workloads run equally well on every cloud, so in some instances the class of workload being run is going to determine which specific cloud platform will be used to run it.

IT teams will also need to determine to what degree they want to manage those cloud services versus relying on the managed services option provided by cloud service providers or the expertise of a third party managed service provider (MSP). The more cloud services employed, the more challenging it becomes to attain and retain the expertise needed to optimally manage a cloud computing environment.

Of course, itโ€™s not clear just how automated the management of cloud computing services will become in the agentic AI. Many of the manual tasks that are today routinely performed by IT specialists will increasingly be handled by AI agents. Theoretically, that should provide IT teams with the time needed to orchestrate the management of more workloads that will be distributed across more cloud computing environments than ever.

In the meantime, IT teams would be well advised to identify which tasks they perform today might best lend themselves to being performed by an AI agent that in the near future will for all intents and purposes become just another member of the IT services management (ITSM) team.

Techstrong TV

Click full-screen to enable volume control
Watch latest episodes and shows

Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live EMEA

SHARE THIS STORY

RELATED STORIES