What is Cloud Sprawl?

Crowd sprawl refers to a sudden and uncontrolled surge or even explosion of an organization's cloud resources, including instances, services, and data, across multiple cloud providers. This usually happens when different departments or teams in an organization acquire their own cloud services without any centralized supervision, governance or oversight. In such a situation, it's nearly impossible to forecast and control cloud spending, because a cloud sprawl leads to a complex, fragmented, and inefficient IT landscape. Basically, any CFO's worst nightmare. 

A significant portion of the sprawl is spending on idle or underutilized resources that no one is tracking. Which means that this is essentially wasted money. It's no surprise, then, that a cloud sprawl leads to security & compliance risks, because a fragmented cloud environment is much harder to secure. Each new instance or service is a potential vulnerability, increasing the risk of a data breach. A breach can lead to massive fines and damage to the company's reputation, which is super counterintuitive, because a CFO is responsible for mitigating such damage.