Do These Cartoons Show The Reality Of Cloud Implementation?

An illustrator has drawn a series of cartoons that they think represent the reality of the ‘cloud party’. Commissioned by Sungard AS, the cartoons came with research that claimed businesses in the UK are spending over £1bn each year on maintaining cloud services, hidden costs and teething problems associated with their cloud computing projects.

The research questioned 150 senior IT decision makers in the UK in organisations with more than 500 employees, with an average cloud spend of £700,000 in the last year.

Keith Tilley, an executive VP at Sungard AS, said: “When it first emerged, cloud was promised as a cure-all for any and every IT headache. However, as the market has matured, it has become clear that some organisations are now left with what we might call a ‘cloud hangover’.

So take a look below, and see if these cartoons look a lot like your office.

The research claimed that the majority of businesses in the UK have encountered some form of unplanned cloud spend (87 percent) – slightly higher than the European average of 81 percent.

Sungard said that not only is each UK organisation paying an average of £200,000 per year to ensure cloud services run effectively, but also an additional £270,000 over the last five years thanks to unforeseen costs such as people to manage deployment (44 percent), internal software maintenance (42 percent) and systems integration (40 percent).

Interestingly, respondents from the UK and France apparently reported significantly higher levels of unplanned cloud spend (£270,000 and £430,000 respectively) than IT decision-makers from Ireland (£150,000) and Sweden (£230,000) and only 54 percent of Irish respondents had encountered unplanned spend on cloud.

Take our Amazon Web Services quiz here!