Channel partners now have a new responsibility: helping clients curb COVID-19-spurred cloud overspending. The spread of COVID-19 continues to ramp up the number of global cloud deployments as organizations seek to provide full-fledged work-from-home capabilities to suddenly remote employees. In fact, the coronavirus pandemic will fuel 2020’s cloud IT infrastructure spending past last year’s. The figures will rise 3.6% over 2019’s $66.8 billion, for a total of $69.2 billion, according to research firm IDC.

Avoiding overprovisioning is tough, especially because cloud providers release new products and services all the time. This can make it harder for IT teams to understand what might make an optimal cloud choice from one day to the next, said Elissa Livingston, senior vice president of growth and strategy at cloud management vendor CloudCheckr.

“It is difficult to keep up, and overspend occurs when older, less efficient resources are deployed instead of the new,” Livingston said. “Complete freedom, without a comprehensive understanding of the many hundreds of available options, opens the door to inefficiency and overspend.”

“Selecting a single or preferred cloud provider with which to aggregate resources and spend will create significant and unmatched opportunity for cost savings,” CloudCheckr’s Livingston said. “In the absence of private pricing or commit-based agreements, companies are more likely to pay on-demand list rates; the delta between the two is overspend.”

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