Companies are moving more and more applications and infrastructure to the cloud, but at the same time they are spending much more than needed. Couchbase, an enterprise database developer, recently published research that concluded just that.

Enterprise cloud costs have increased by more than 35% because of inflexible pricing plans, management tools that don't give users the control they need, and data that isn't stored where it should be. According to the research, a typical enterprise spends more than $33 million per year on cloud services. This represents $8.75 million that can be saved or spent elsewhere if enterprises and cloud providers can overcome these challenges.

Another key conclusion is that cloud services often do not meet expectations, and they add to the complexity and cost of IT. 61 percent of enterprises have had to limit their digital transformation ambitions because of cloud-based challenges, and 58% used cloud services that could not scale as the business grew. Even so, the survey shows that cloud is unstoppable: 95% of enterprises said that more infrastructure will be moved to the cloud in the future.

Enterprises remain optimistic about the cloud despite the costs and challenges they face. Almost every respondent is confident that they have the security, availability, performance, cost-effectiveness, control, scalability, and compliance they need from their cloud services.

The cloud spend is growing as well. Enterprises intend to spend 58% of their IT budget in the public cloud by 2025, and they are already more than halfway there. The reasons are obvious. When asked specifically about Databases as a Service (DBaaS), enterprises pointed out that cloud services can provide better uptime SLAs than their own teams, and that switching to consumption-based pricing can give them a better budget.

Security of data is the top concern of 43% of respondents, followed by managing data in the cloud (33%) and future-proofing to meet future demands (31%), while 30% are concerned about keeping costs in check.

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