Getting a grip on escalating cloud costs

The cloud has become the dominant delivery mechanism for enterprise services, with the latest figures suggesting that 96% of enterprises use cloud services in some form1.  It is easy to understand why customers find the choice and convenience of the cloud so attractive: indeed, the inspiration for the Orange Business Evolution Platform lies in the desire to marry these attributes with the robust, reliable real-world connectivity associated with the telco world. However, while consumption-based pricing has always been core to our vision for Evolution Platform, there are other aspects of the cloud model – particularly the lack of cost transparency – that we have been determined to address.  

The following statistics give a flavor of the level of dissatisfaction from businesses on this issue. Recent research revealed that an overwhelming majority (84%) of respondents believe that managing cloud spend is the top cloud challenge facing them today. An even greater number (87%) indicated that cost efficiency/savings was the key metric used to assess progress against cloud goals2. The same research found that cloud budgets are already exceeding limits by 17%, while IDC found that 49% of European organizations expect to overspend on digital infrastructure3. With cloud spend expected to increase by 28% in the coming year, and one-third (33%) of organizations currently spending more than $12 million annually on the public cloud alone4, this is a problem that needs solving.  

Instances of spiraling cloud costs spring from several sources. A key factor is egress costs (fees for moving data out of the cloud), which are typically charged per Gigabyte and are often high and unpredictable. Additionally, hard-to-track charges are levied on traffic moving between Availability Zones and Regions. There is also a lack of visibility over cloud charges, with the costs of unused services easily running into tens of thousands of pounds per month for large organizations: a recent BCG study indicated that up to 30% of cloud spending was wasted due to inefficient usage and a lack of cost control5.

Given the scale of these issues, it comes as no surprise to learn that 60% of organizations are turning to third parties to manage cloud services6. For organizations looking for such help, Evolution Platform offers a new approach to managing network and cloud services. Evolution Platform hosts a range of virtual infrastructure services from over 16 partners, including market leaders such as Fortinet, Palo Alto, Cisco, Aviatrix, and Zscaler. Customers can ‘pick and mix’ from among any of these solutions, with the underlying ‘chaining’ of these services handled automatically by the platform. As Analyst HFS recently commented, “Evolution Platform will transform service delivery, [enabling customers to] simplify vendor complexity and control costs with a single, flexible backbone7”.  

Evolution Platform’s flexible, consumption-based pricing model gives on-demand access to connectivity, cybersecurity, and cloud services, with customers paying only for what they use. Organizations can scale resources up or down as required to minimize over-provisioning, a prime cause of unnecessary expense. This approach also eliminates the need for upfront CAPEX investments in expensive, dedicated hardware at every site, giving organizations greater control over their budgets.  

Orange Business also charges for data traffic based on bandwidth, rather than volume, to provide lower and more predictable pricing. Overall, it addresses a broad swathe of cloud-related cost concerns to lower the Total Cost of Ownership.

Vendor lock-in arises when the costs of switching to an alternative provider become too high to be practical, something that was a concern for more than 60% of respondents to a 2025 survey8.  Evolution Platform’s modular nature addresses this problem head-on. Customers can easily swap out one service for another if their circumstances change. It also allows customers to seamlessly plug into different cloud (or indeed LLM) platforms, further alleviating lock-in concerns. 

IDC (2024) reported that 27% of organizations said ‘Cloud Sprawl’ – the uncontrolled proliferation of cloud resources from different vendors – was a key reason for higher operational costs9. The Multi-sourcing Service Integration capabilities built into Evolution Platform use automated AI-driven processes to tackle cloud sprawl by enabling customers to manage multiple IT suppliers seamlessly from a single interface. This simplifies network and security management to reduce operational complexity, streamline service delivery, and free up in-house IT teams from dedicated maintenance and monitoring. Customers can also use "On-Demand Cloud Connect" to create and modify connections to cloud providers in real-time, only paying for the bandwidth required at that time.  

McKinsey (2025) found that 28% of cloud spending was wasted due to a lack of unified visibility10, a problem that can be overcome through the intelligent application of FinOps. This can be described as a framework for managing operational costs across an organization, often in conjunction with cloud computing. With organizations highly motivated to rein in cloud overspend, 59% of cloud professionals say they plan to expand their use of FinOps11.  

Rather than treating FinOps as an add-on, Orange Business has embedded it into the way the platform is delivered. It provides a real-time estimate of consumption and facilitates payment on a daily pro-rata basis, and enhances financial management with complete visibility of all service costs (including those of third parties like the cloud providers). Orange Business tools like Cloud Advisor and built-in dashboards can be used with the Evolution Platform to help monitor consumption and optimize costs, with customers typically saving from 20% to 40% on monthly costs. To give one example, a multinational customer who migrated from traditional data centers to the platform's cloud-centric infrastructure achieved a projected TCO reduction of over 20% within five years12.  

 Beyond these specific features, the inherent nature of Evolution Platform helps organizations to address the problem of escalating cloud costs.  

• The high degree of automation means less manual work, fewer incidents, and faster service changes.  
• Customers can manage their entire infrastructure from a single dashboard, gaining end-to-end visibility of all SD-WAN, Wi-Fi, IoT, and security/SASE services and reducing the operational costs associated with managing different vendors independently.  
• Engagement models are highly flexible, allowing customers to choose between fully managed, co-managed, or DIY approaches to aligning costs with their specific IT skills and budget. 
• Finally, the platform's robust infrastructure and strong Service Level Agreements ensure high performance and reliability that minimize the risk of costly downtime and disruptions. 

In summary, the Orange Business Evolution Platform is engineered to deliver substantial cost savings for customers by combining flexible service models, automation-driven efficiencies, optimized infrastructure, and expert support. This holistic approach to infrastructure management enables organizations to innovate confidently while maintaining tight control over their IT spending.