In a business environment defined by volatility and the constant pressure to do more with less, South African organisations are leaking capital through a common but often overlooked channel. According to Dominique Yeates, head of product operations at Qwerti, over-provisioning services has become the silent budget drain in local IT sectors, resulting in significant financial waste on resources that provide no operational value.
The practice of over-provisioning involves allocating more IT resources, such as server space, cloud storage, or processing power, than is actually required to run workloads. Historically, this was done as a safety net to prevent downtime during traffic spikes. However, in the modern era of elastic cloud computing and scalable services, Yeates argues that this "just in case" mentality is outdated and expensive.
“Paying for resources you do not use is money left on the table,” she says. “For many companies, this stems from a fear of under-performance. IT managers often overestimate their needs to ensure uptime, but the gap between what is purchased and what is utilised is where the budget evaporates.”
Industry data supports this view. Seventy-eight percent of respondents to Stacklet’s State of Cloud Usage Optimisation 2024 estimated that 21% to 50% of their cloud spend is wasted. To address this, Yeates suggests a four-step approach to rightsizing IT environments.
The first step is a comprehensive audit of actual usage. Organisations cannot manage what they do not measure. By auditing the current environment, businesses can identify "zombie" resources - infrastructure that is running and being paid for but is not actually supporting any active processes.
Once the waste is identified, the next phase is rightsizing resources to match demand. This involves adjusting the size of the instances or services to fit the workload requirements accurately. Yeates emphasises that this does not mean cutting corners or risking outages; rather, it is about precision.
The third component is automating monitoring for real-time insights. “Manual tracking of IT usage is no longer feasible given the complexity of modern tech stacks,” says Yeates. “Automated tools can alert teams when usage drops or spikes, allowing for dynamic adjustments rather than static over-provisioning.”
Finally, Yeates advises businesses to review contracts for flexibility. Many legacy agreements lock companies into fixed capacities. Shifting to consumption-based models or renegotiating terms to allow for scaling down as well as up can provide necessary fiscal agility.
For South African businesses facing global competition and local economic constraints, the margin for error is slimming. Yeates concludes that the goal of product operations is efficiency. By eliminating the safety buffer of over-provisioning and replacing it with intelligent, data-driven management, companies can reinvest that wasted capital into innovation rather than infrastructure that sits idle.
