Cloud spend soars as organizations adapt to COVID-19
The latest State of the Cloud report from Flexera reveals that 59 percent of enterprises expect their cloud usage to exceed prior plans due to COVID-19.
Organizations are over budget for cloud spending by an average of 23 percent, and expect cloud spend to increase by 47 percent next year. However, respondents estimate that 30 percent of their cloud spend gets wasted.
Based on feedback from a panel of 750 technical professionals from around the globe, the findings show that 93 percent of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy while 87 percent have a hybrid cloud strategy. More than half of enterprise workloads and data are expected to be in a public cloud within 12 months.
Spending on public cloud is high too with 20 percent of enterprises spending more than $12 million per year. 77 percent use cost efficiency and savings to measure their cloud progress.
Jim Ryan, president and CEO of Flexera says:
The State of the Cloud survey captures insights into how organizations are progressing in their journey to cloud. That journey is even more important for businesses today as we face the unprecedented operational impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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.
When asked about the challenges that the cloud presents, 83 percent of enterprises indicate that security is a challenge, followed by 82 percent for managing cloud spend and 79 percent for governance. 56 percent of organizations report that understanding cost implications of software licenses is a challenge
For cloud beginners a lack of resources and/or expertise is the top challenge; while for advanced cloud users, managing cloud spend is the top challenge.
You can find out more in the full report which is available on the Flexera site.
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