There’s an invisible substance in the air throughout the technology industry today. As people walk though it and breathe it in, it makes them believe cloud computing is superior to on-premises infrastructure. All the buzzwords, like simplified, pay-as-you-go, and elastic, lure one to the cloud. But when companies actually make the move to public cloud services, the head trip might end in a costly, complicated hangover.

That is, if they don’t know how to manage cloud resources.

“There’s some fascinating data that says 80 percent of customers receive a cloud bill north of three times what they expected to spend,” said Ben Nye (pictured), chief executive officer at Turbonomic Inc. Just imagine that conversation: “Hey boss, I just spent the entire annual budget in a little over a quarter. You still want to get that cup of coffee?” Nye joked.

Further, only about 14 percent feel that they have the skills to operate in cloud, according to Nye. This is scary, since mishandling data across international locations could result in steep General Data Protection Regulation penalties.

So why are people bothering to rush to cloud, anyway? Because the benefits are real. They just need to pull some levers to reduce negatives, like resource overspend, according to Nye.

“Software can manage all this, and automation can help alleviate the constraint of the skills gap that’s going on,” he said.

Nye spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, in theCUBE’s studio in Boston, Massachusetts. They discussed how automation and “AI Ops” manage workloads and resources across multiple environments. (* Disclosure below.)

‘Simple’ cloud pie-in-the-sky

Just a few years ago, most organizations thought cloud was synonymous with simplicity. A quick look at some facts and figures reveals what kind of beast we’re dealing with today.

“If I go and provision a workload in Amazon EC2 alone, there’s 1.7 million different combinations from which I can choose across all the availability zones, all the regions and all the services,” Nye said. Doesn’t exactly sound simple, does it?

“If I want to leverage the elasticity and agility of the cloud, I have to do it in a smarter measure. And that requires analytics,” he added.

Turbonomic users can avoid costly over-provisioning of resources in cost-variable cloud environments, according to Nye. The technology manages any workload, in any environment, anywhere at any time. Its AI Ops and analytics technology allows workloads to pick their resources and take care of their own performance assurance, policy adherence and cost-effectiveness. This relieves the burden on IT administrators, cuts costs, and enhances security across disparate environments, Nye concluded.

Watch the entire video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Turbonomic Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Turbonomic nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE