Managing tech costs in a volatile market

(Image credit: Future)

IT spend can be incredibly hard to accurately calculate. If you’re reliant on public cloud providers for your AI and software needs, you’re open to price rises, license changes, and other baked in costs.

The past few years have seen some firms choose to repatriate workloads to offset cloud costs – but this comes with its own risks. Surging international oil and gas prices, driven by conflict, are driving up bills for enterprises and consumers alike – bad news for those running AI workloads on premise.

How can leaders begin to get a grip on these costs? And what are some of the major challenges down the road?

In this episode Rory is joined by Greg Holmes, EMEA Field CTO at Apptio (an IBM Company), to discuss managing technology spend in the face of rising global instability.

Highlights

"I think companies are struggling to really understand what the cost per query is, but they may have an understanding of the whole service. They know how big their bill with a certain AI provider is, but I've heard of companies who've blown through a whole year's budget of AI in a couple of months of the year..."

"You notice that there's cheaper periods of the day to use energy, and then there's very expensive periods of the day, and some suppliers even give free energy or pay you to use energy when it's at really high availability. So it can be a good case to say then if workloads don't need to run at a particular time, if there's some flexibility, then having a system that can help you schedule and plan workloads and the running of those workloads, regardless of if they're in public cloud providers or in your own data center, could actually make a big difference as well."

"[I]n the cloud, we call this kind of operation FinOps, right? So FinOps is looking at a very granular level, because a lot of your cloud billing data and a lot of your cloud consumption data can be seen on an hourly basis. We can actually break that down and provide alerting to rapid changes in your consumption, but we can also help organizations use that programmatically, so you can make it available through API back to the developers, so they could actually be looking at their costs as things are going and choose appropriately."

"Yeah, well, we're certainly seeing countries putting the pause on certain developments. So I was reading recently about Denmark halting additional gen AI data centers, partly because of the power consumption demands. So for instance, a country like Denmark has a peak demand at around seven gigawatts. They had a set of requests of about 60 gigawatts for that country, right? So it's ten times, or nine times the peak and AI data centers were taking up about 14 gigawatts of those requests."

Footnotes

TOPICS

Rory Bathgate was Features and Multimedia Editor at ITPro until 2026, overseeing all in-depth content and case studies. He also co-hosted the ITPro Podcast with Jane McCallion, swapping a keyboard for a microphone to discuss the latest learnings with thought leaders from across the tech sector.

In his free time, Rory enjoys photography, video editing, and good science fiction. After graduating from the University of Kent with a BA in English and American Literature, Rory undertook an MA in Eighteenth-Century Studies at King’s College London. He joined ITPro in 2022 as a graduate, following four years in student journalism. You can contact Rory on LinkedIn.

Highlights

Footnotes

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