Enterprise adoption of cloud computing has created a paradox, according to one market researcher: Although companies move to the cloud to take advantage of lower costs, most of them end up spending more on their cloud infrastructures than they did with installations in their own data centers.

451 Research Inc. said Tuesday in its newly published study on cloud adoption that the main reason for this increased spend is that companies raise their consumption once they’ve moved to the cloud. Waste of cloud resources is a second factor, the analyst firm said.

“Reality doesn’t match expectations,” 451 Research concluded in its survey, which found that costs, the top driver of enterprise cloud adoption, are the No. 1 pain point following migration.

The analyst firm found that most companies see immediate cost savings after migrating workloads to the cloud. However, those upfront savings are eroded by what 451 Research calls “switching costs,” or the costs of migrating applications to the cloud in the first place. In addition, “infrastructure costs slowly and surely ramp up,” as enterprises use more and more cloud resources.

“Cloud is an inexpensive and easily accessible technology,” 451 Research said. “People consume more, thereby spending more, and forget to control or limit their consumption.”

451 Research said this is called the “Jevons Paradox,” in which ease of access to technology and lower costs drive developers and administrators to consume more. Unit costs stay low, but total costs increase.

Once costs begin to spiral out of control, some enterprises respond by deciding to bring some workloads back into their own data centers. Other companies try to implement resource governance guidelines or prioritize consumption for certain projects, while still others make individual departments responsible for cloud costs, providing budgetary incentives to keep a lid on them.

451 Research concluded that enterprises are entering a new phase in which they attempt to minimize costs while enabling “flexible IT consumption.”

“We are entering the brave new world of utility computing,” the study asserted.

Utility computing demands that companies become a lot more selective about how and where they use cloud resources, and the trend is already becoming popular, 451 Research said. As evidence of this claim, it cited the fact that 34 percent of enterprises have migrated applications and data from a public cloud to an on-premises or private cloud environment in the last year.

The growing costs of cloud computing have led to a surge in the use of governance tools designed to help companies keep a lid on spending, 451 Research said. However, though these tools can be helpful, there’s still an inevitable amount of wasted resources.

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