Rising Cloud Costs Causing a Storm for Customers

The Big Three Cloud providers are facing a wave of discontent as companies start baulking at rising costs.

A new report focussing on Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Amazon Web Services, shows that pricing for cloud platforms is increasing, and clients aren’t happy.

While there are plenty of free Cloud options available, it is these three vendors who dominate the enterprise Cloud market.

Costs, Complexity and Concerns Over Privacy

The report, published by Cloud computing expert, Civo, details the challenges being faced by enterprise customers and corporate administrators. It surveyed 500 professionals in the Cloud industry.

“Since our previous cost of cloud report two years ago, concerns surrounding the complexity and unpredictability of Cloud costs have continued to grow, posing significant challenges for organizations of all sizes”, the Civo team writes.

It says that the Big Three have not fulfilled their promises of “scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency”, hitting out at “rising costs, complex billing models, and concerns over data sovereignty and privacy”.

Companies Struggling with Rising Cloud Prices

The survey results make for stark reading with 59 percent sharing that the Cloud spending had increased in the past year.

Civo compared costs from 2022 to 2024 for a three-node cluster that included 200 GB of persistent storage and a 5 TB data transfer threshold. In the last two years, prices increased from $1,278.58 to $1,458.68 on Microsoft’s cloud platform. Google’s cloud solution saw an increase from $1,107.61 to $1,250.35. Lastly, Amazon prices went from $1,142.46 to $1,234.59.

Dominance by the Tech Trio

However, companies are in a Catch-22 because 77.4 percent of those surveyed have opted to use the Cloud services provided by these three major players.

There are options from smaller companies but Microsoft, Google and Amazon lead the pack leaving users stuck with their rising prices. Customers are now questioning the benefits of Cloud Management.

Microsoft and Google have not responded to a comment request from The Register while Amazon says it has reduced prices 134 times since the service’s introduction in 2006.

The rising costs of power and experienced IT staff though are driving up the maintenance and development costs for these companies. They are passing this onto customers but this report suggest that there might be a tipping point for companies when the costs overweigh the benefits.