The Cloud Central Committee: A Case Study on Capacity Planning in Large IT Enterprises

• Pedro Serey UFCG http://orcid.org/0009-0004-1906-9021
• Caio Galvão UFCG
• Thiago Emmanuel Pereira UFCG https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2702-6019
• Francisco Vilar Brasileiro UFCG https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9631-0190
• Gabriel Gomes UFCG / VTEX

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/sbrc_estendido.2025.5891

Abstract

Large companies often decentralize into sub-organizations to accelerate decision-making. For instance, when using IaaS, these sub-organizations might independently purchase cloud resources. While flexible, such a decentralized approach can be more expensive than a company-wide, centralized strategy, due to a wider variation in usage patterns of sub-organizations. To investigate these trade-offs within the scenario of a major IaaS consumer, we analyzed multiple years of cloud purchase data from a partner company to quantify potential cost savings under different organizational models. Our findings show that centralization yielded significant savings, potentially reducing IaaS costs by nearly 9%, translating into millions of dollars in savings in this case study.

Keywords: Cloud, Capacity Planning, Organizational Design

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