According to a new report published by Anodot, the business monitoring company, nearly half of businesses (49%) find it difficult to get cloud costs under control, and 54% believe their primary source of cloud waste is a lack of visibility into cloud usage. The findings highlight an ongoing visibility crisis in which organizations are struggling to gain appropriate insights into the breakdown of cloud costs and efficiency of cloud use and therefore cannot effectively reduce wasted spend – even as cloud migration continues to rise and cutting costs is a priority.

Anodot’s 2021 State of Cloud Cost Report revealed that the pandemic greatly accelerated many companies’ shift to the cloud, and the latest survey confirms that the transition is continuing as businesses continue to appreciate the agility and scalability the cloud provides: 91% of respondents reported they currently have IT infrastructure in the cloud; 60% said that migrating more workloads to the cloud is their top cloud initiative in the coming year.

As enterprises continue to face high monthly cloud bills – with cloud costs ranking second only to payroll in terms of business expenses for many – visualizing costs, optimizing spend and reducing wasted dollars are top priorities, especially in the wake of a slowing economy.

A significant portion of these inflated cloud bills could have been avoided: 44% of respondents said that at least one-third (33%) of their cloud spend is wasted each year. Visibility is the main culprit: the majority of executives surveyed (53%) said gaining visibility into cloud usage and costs is their top challenge for controlling spend and reducing waste; one-fifth (19%) said they lack the ability to manage their cloud budget due to insufficient visibility into cloud usage.

Cloud costs are also becoming increasingly complex to track and understand, also leading to misspending: 46% of executives reported that overprovisioning is a primary source of cloud waste, while 45% blamed cloud assets’ fragmentation across teams and vendors.

The report is based on a survey of 131 US-based IT directors and executives.