Communications of the ACM
Companies Turn to AI to Avoid 'Cloud Sprawl'
Among other approaches, AI is being used to identify cloud-use patterns across an organization, and then to flag areas of duplication, waste, or mismatches between actual usage and existing payment plans.
Credit: verdict.co.uk
Companies are turning to artificial intelligence to root out savings in runaway cloud-computing bills, tapping software designed to pinpoint overlapping cloud applications, excess data storage and other inefficiencies across information-technology systems, corporate technology chiefs and industry analysts say.
The efforts come as cloud-based tools take over an ever-wider range of operations. That, and the murky economic outlook, is prompting many chief information officers and other enterprise technology leaders to take a closer look at cloud costs—even as they increase overall spending.
One key advantage of third-party cloud systems, such as Amazon.com Inc.'s Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Corp.'s Azure, is that they enable companies to quickly scale up or down computing power as needed—rather than paying to run half-empty in-house data centers in order to handle an occasional surge in demand.
But like most online subscriptions, losing track of a tangled web of cloud services can be just as wasteful, said Andy Sealock, a senior partner at West Monroe, a digital-services consulting firm.
From The Wall Street Journal
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