New Survey Highlights Cloud Use, Plans, and Challenges
Cloud spending exceeds budgets as organizations expect increased cloud use due to COVID-19 according to Flexera’s “State of the Cloud” report.
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Flexera today released results of its ninth
State of the Cloud report
that examines enterprise cloud use, including multicloud strategies,
spending trends, and top cloud initiatives. This year’s report explores the
thinking of 750 global cloud decision makers and users regarding public,
private, and multicloud options and shares their current and future cloud
adoption.
Jim Ryan, President and CEO of Flexera, noted that “With employees working
from home and more business interactions going digital, more than half of
enterprise respondents said their cloud usage will be higher than
originally planned at the beginning of the year due to the pandemic.
Companies plan to migrate more services to cloud, yet they’re already
exceeding cloud budgets. They will need to focus on optimizing workloads as
they migrate in addition to cost management and governance to ensure
operational efficiency.”
A few key highlights from the report:
Organizations embrace multicloud: Almost all enterprises (93%) have a multicloud strategy; 87% have a hybrid cloud
strategy; respondents use an average of 2.2 public clouds and 2.2 private
clouds
Public cloud adoption continues to accelerate: One-fifth (20%) of enterprises spend more than $12 million per year on
public cloud; more than half of enterprise workloads and data are expected
to be in a public cloud within 12 months
Cloud use expectations exceeds earlier forecasts:
Nearly six in ten enterprises (59%) expect cloud usage to exceed prior
plans due to COVID-19
Cloud cost optimization: Organizations are over budget for spending on cloud technologies by an
average of 23 percent and expect cloud spend to increase by 47 percent
next year; they estimate that 30 percent of cloud spending is wasted
Cloud initiatives and metrics: Almost three-quarters or organizations (73%) plan to optimize existing
use of cloud (cost savings), making it the top initiative for the fourth
year in a row; 61% percent of organizations plan to focus on cloud
migration; 77% of organizations use cost efficiency and savings to measure
cloud progress
Organizational approach to cloud:
Most enterprises (73%) have a central cloud team or cloud center of
excellence; 57% of cloud teams are responsible for governing
infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS)/platform-as-a-service (PaaS) usage costs
Cloud challenges
: The top challenge in cloud migration is understanding application
dependencies; 83% of enterprises indicate that security is a challenge,
followed by 82 percent for managing cloud spending and 79 percent for
governance; for cloud beginners, lack of resources/expertise is the top
challenge; for advanced cloud users, managing cloud spending is the top
challenge
The report leveraged a panel of 750 technical professionals from around the
globe and across a broad cross-section of industries, providing insight
into their adoption of cloud infrastructure. The independent panel
comprises vetted respondents with detailed profiles and is rigorously
maintained. The survey was conducted in the first quarter of 2020.
Complete results and highlights are available
here
at no cost but registration is required. The report results are made
available under an Open Source Creative Commons License so the data may be
freely shared with the required attribution.