As organizations continue to migrate to the cloud, clearly understanding usage and costs is proving to be a significant challenge.

Unlike on-premise infrastructure, most cloud providers use a pay-as-you-go model, allowing for a low barrier-to-entry and easy scalability. Unfortunately, that model can also lead to significant challenges accurately predicting how much cloud computing will ultimately cost.

According to Anodot’s State of Cloud Cost Report, almost 50% of IT executives say it’s proving difficult to control cloud costs, while respondents say that gaining visibility and understanding both usage and costs is a top challenge. Similarly, 88% cite optimization and reduced spending on existing cloud deployments as extremely or very important.

Interestingly, despite these concerns, 60% of those polled plan to migrate more workloads to the cloud in the coming year.

Anadot highlights the importance of organizations carefully tracking their cloud usage to better understand their needs and associated costs:

Unless costs are managed carefully, it’s quite easy to lose track of what’s being used—especially for organizations with large development teams that move quickly and tend to try new things. Misconfigurations, over-provisioning, and forgotten resources that have been provisioned but abandoned are the bane of cost management for DevOps teams. Unfortunately, for many organizations, the surprise costs only show up when the monthly invoice arrives.

Understanding cloud cost visibility is not a new challenge. In fact, AWS recently took steps to lower customers’ bills following years of complaints and a reputation for surprise bills, artificially high fees, and hidden costs.

With 60% of organizations planning to increase their cloud deployments, cost visibility is something that will need to be addressed sooner rather than later.