Companies, like cities, tend to sprawl. Whether it's schedules stuffed to bursting or 17 managers when all you need is a spoon, businesses everywhere are badly in need of a trim.

The same is true for cloud solutions, which have proliferated over the last few years at an astonishing rate.

At best, a cloud-native company is a beautiful garden, all manicured lawns and tastefully-pruned trellises. But at worst, it's an unmanageable tangle of weeds, long grass and rotting windfall.

This is what's known as "cloud sprawl". In the words of Stephen J Bigelow at TechTarget, it's "the uncontrolled proliferation of an organisation's cloud instances, services or providers".

In other words, you've got reams and reams of data but you don't know where it is. You're not entirely sure who has access to it or what they're doing with it.

The chief cause, says Bigelow, is a lack of visibility. "Visibility" is a buzzword in cloud tech which basically means that you know where things are located.

If you don't tame cloud sprawl, it can get out of control, with new applications and workloads sprouting up like mushrooms overnight.

It's a problem because data is one of your biggest assets. When put to work, data can improve decision-making, give insights into client behaviour, sense demand and streamline processes.

But if you're overseeing a company where cloud services keep being added without planning or oversight, you're not getting the best out of your data. It's taking on a life of its own.

There's a tricky balance to be struck between wanting a lot of analytics-rich data and having to hack through a jungle of data with no obvious end in sight.

The problem with cloud sprawl

Ever looked at your bank balance and realised that you never cancelled that Amazon Prime trial? And wait a minute – did you take out a subscription to House and Home?

It might sound ridiculous, but this is the consumer equivalent of business cloud sprawl. You're subscribing to services you don't need. Managers lose sight of user accounts and end up overspending.

This is far from ideal. For one thing, one of the biggest benefits of cloud solutions is that they're scalable and give you the capacity you need. You're not paying for an underused data centre.

But if you migrate to the cloud and then end up paying for multitudes of unnecessary or even obsolete user accounts, you're cancelling out those cost savings. It's the IT equivalent of taking the coach rather than the train and then buying a €10 sausage sandwich at the station.

The other issue is when different departments or branches use different cloud providers. This makes for a lack of consistency and incompatible APIs.

It's not just about money and consistency, though. It's also about security. Research by the Cloud Security Alliance put cloud sprawl near the top of its list of security threats.

Cloud sprawl, then, isn't something you should take lightly.

What are the types of cloud sprawl?

There are three main types of cloud sprawl: platform sprawl, data sprawl and identity sprawl.

These days, it's rare for a company to use just one cloud environment. Companies will use different providers – Microsoft, AWS or Google, to name three of the most popular – for different tasks.

And as well as using multiple providers, they use multiple software platforms. In 2020, the average number per company was 32. Given the explosion in cloud adoption since then, we can only assume that figure's now higher.

Multi-cloud environments have definite benefits. But they can lead to a lack of visibility. Without centralised monitoring, you run the risk of overstretching your IT department.

Then there's data sprawl. If you find yourself unsure where data is or who has access to it, you're suffering from a bad case of the data sprawl blues.

There's nothing new here – before the millennium every office had a store cupboard full of redundant or duplicate files.

But these days, there's just so much of it. And if it's spread across different platforms and environments, you could be sitting on a ticking security time bomb.

Finally, there's identity sprawl. This is where your company simply has too many cloud accounts which need to be consolidated.

The role of AI

Some companies have turned to AI to get on top of cloud sprawl.

As the Wall Street Journal reported, "Cloud-computing usage at large companies is measured in millions of records a day, making it 'humanly impossible' to keep track of costs".

Because of this, they're using AI to "pinpoint overlapping cloud applications, excess data storage and other inefficiencies".

These AI algorithms can identify the most cost-effective cloud service for a specific task at any given time. They monitor the multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environment and root out redundancies.

This has a lot of potential – but at the time of writing, it's not something that can be deployed widely.

So what's the solution?

As with many cloud issues, you're faced with a choice.

You can educate and reskill your team so that everyone knows as much about cloud platforms as possible. Managers acquire the skills needed for maximum visibility and streamlining.

The obvious setback here is money. Just training one or two members of staff isn't going to make a significant difference. You need the whole team to be on board – and that's a big budgetary ask.

This is where cloud consultants can help. Rather than sinking time and money into a large-scale training programme, you can leverage third-party expertise.

A cloud consultancy service can help you to develop, plan and execute a strategy that will tame cloud sprawl and make your online operations leaner than ever.

That way, you can entrust your cloud strategy to the experts and get on with what you know best – making your business grow.

Are you looking for expert VMware consultancy? At Ascend Cloud Solutions, we help businesses of all sizes make the most of their cloud investment. Get in touch today for a free, no-obligation quote.