RESEARCH & RESOURCES

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.

Note: TDWI’s editors carefully choose press releases related to the data and analytics industry. We have edited and/or condensed this release to highlight key features but make no claims as to the accuracy of the author's statements.

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.

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