Public cloud services have transformed the compute landscape, providing a convenient alternative to costly and inflexible on-premises data center infrastructures. However, as organizations have increased their use of public clouds, their cloud spend has risen dramatically. A 2024 report found that many businesses spend $2.4 million to $12 million yearly on public clouds, with nearly one-third of cloud customers surveyed spending more than $12 million annually. Many companies report far greater costs — often 10x greater or more.

Akamai was no exception to this trend. Recognizing aggressive growth in our third-party cloud spend, we embarked on an initiative to migrate third-party public cloud workloads to our public cloud global infrastructure, Akamai Connected Cloud.