2025: Will your cloud costing strategy be a nightmare or a masterpiece?

The future brings opportunities, but also major challenges for IT managers. Gartner predicts that cloud spending will increase by over 21% by 2025, while the complexity of cloud environments increases and the shortage of IT specialists becomes more acute. These developments can have a huge impact on your budget, efficiency and strategic choices.

The good news? With a smart approach, you can not only keep a grip on your cloud spending, but also save costs and position your organization more strongly. In this blog, I take you through the trends, pitfalls and solutions that will help you future-proof your IT strategy.

Cloud costs are exploding: Is your budget prepared?

Gartner predicts that by 2025, global cloud spending will rise from $595.7 billion to $723.4 billion. That's over 21% in one year. A very substantial increase. We see the trend with our customers as well; cloud spending is only going up and not just because they are doing more in the cloud.

Prices are structurally going up

Cloud vendors' prices are only going one way, up. Often without delivering any extra value in return. The applies to the cost of Pay-As-You-Go but also to contracts for reserved instances that expire and are replaced with more expensive alternatives. In other words, you pay more for the same service.

Unused cloud resources: the hidden leak in your budget

Our Cloud Cost Audit™ shows time and time again that 20% of cloud resources are unnecessary. Think of servers that are running but add no value, databases that are never addressed or storage that is forgotten. This “deadwood” costs you tens to sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. The good news is that after a Cloud Cost Audit™, you'll know exactly what your immediate savings are. Without the risk of throwing away cloud resources that are still in use.

💡 Solution: Clean up unused resources with a Cloud Cost Audit™ and commit to strategic contract renewals.

Cloud connectivity: The silent bottleneck of 2025

The more data and applications move to the cloud, the greater the demands on connectivity. A simple VPN solution quickly becomes inadequate and can lead to frustration, downtime and higher costs. What our team encounters:

Bottlenecks form faster than you think
Without a clear Quality of Service (QoS) strategy, connections can quickly become overloaded. This leads to slow response times and, worse, disruptions in mission-critical processes.
SD-WAN: A solution with nuance
Not every SD-WAN solution offers the same benefits. Where some providers simply provide some sort of VPN, others offer advanced options such as segregated data traffic and bandwidth management. It is crucial to understand what you are buying before considering an SD-WAN implementation.
Cost of poor connectivity
Downtime and slow connections not only have a direct financial impact, but also undermine confidence in your IT department and your strategic choices.

💡 Solution: Get your connectivity in order on time. This will prevent costly problems later and strengthen the reliability of your cloud environment.

Data centers in crisis: you’re paying the bill

On the day this blog is published, the Dutch Datacenter Association, among others, are filing a lawsuit against the ACM to gain priority for new connections to the power grid. The reason: demand exceeds supply. Important question here is: how does this affect your organization?

Less capacity, higher costs
Data centers have limited access to energy, which means they can offer less capacity. This leads to higher prices and longer wait times for new connections.
The impact on hosting and cloud usage
If your hosting provider or cloud provider is limited by data center scarcity, it can directly affect the cost and availability of your services.
Smarter use of resources
By using your cloud resources more efficiently, you can reduce your reliance on data centers and lower your costs.

Data center scarcity is not becoming a problem, it’s already a problem. I have already written about that at length in this blog.

💡 Solution: Save on data center and cloud costs with tools such as our Frozen Screen Scan™, Cloud Cost Audit™ and Application Health Check™. These tools identify inefficiencies and offer practical solutions. We detect inefficiencies quickly for you, and often you can save 50% of your costs.

Complexity: The hidden cost of 2025

Moving to public, multi- or hybrid cloud sounds appealing, but it also brings new challenges. Complexity is often an underestimated cost that impacts both directly and indirectly.

The risks of more complexity:

Higher costs due to more management
Complexity requires specialized knowledge, leading to higher personnel costs or the need to hire expensive outside expertise.
Error sensitivity
Improperly set up processes increase the likelihood of errors. One of our customers experienced this when their network was down for weeks due to an improperly set up cloud landscape. The connection between their office and the cloud provider became disrupted for long periods of time, leading to weeks of production downtime for critical applications.
Productivity loss
Complexity slows down not only your IT processes, but also the productivity of your entire organization.

More complexity always means higher costs. It also increases end-user frustration. It takes specialized knowledge to reduce, manage and control complexity. You get that knowledge by hiring new staff or by hiring long-term external expertise-both with a hefty price tag.

💡 Solution: Use tools like the Frozen Screen Scan™ to simplify your cloud environment and reduce costs.

Shortage of knowledge: What will a good specialist cost in 2025?

By 2025, more and more companies are migrating toward the cloud. The shortage of cloud specialists is a challenge that will only get worse. Demand for experts is growing faster than supply, leading to higher costs and longer recruitment processes.

What’s going to happen in 2025:

IT expertise will become a luxury
With more and more companies migrating to the cloud, specialist rates are rising. This makes it harder to find and retain the right people. In addition, this puts further pressure on budgets.
AI doesn't offer a solution (yet)
Although AI is making great strides, it will not yet be able to fully take over complex cloud optimizations in 2025. So IT managers will have to continue to rely on human expertise.
Internal teams overstretched
The shortage of external specialists often puts pressure on internal teams, which can lead to burnout and loss of focus.

Again, demand exceeds supply: the recruitment of new experts is too slow. Knowledge and understanding are essential to optimize your cloud spending.

💡 Solution: Combine in-house knowledge with our proven tools and expertise for a cost-effective solution. Long-term deployment is pricey; our tools are not.

Turn 2025 into a year of success: take control of your cloud strategy

The challenges are expanding rapidly BUT the solutions are within reach. Whether it's cost savings, complexity reduction or addressing workforce issues, we're ready to help.

💡 Time for action! Schedule a free 30-minute appointment and find out how our Cloud Cost Audit™ can help your organization save at least 10%. No savings? No cost.

Book your appointment here

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