Managing spending is the biggest cloud challenge

For the second year running managing cloud spending is the top challenge facing organizations, according to the latest Flexera State of the Cloud Report.

The survey of over 750 respondents shows more than a quarter of them spend over $12 million a year on cloud (29 percent), and 22 percent spend that much on SaaS.

There's been a slight increase in multi-cloud usage, up from 87 percent last year to 89 percent this year. 61 percent of large enterprises use multi-cloud security, and 57 percent use multi-cloud FinOps (cost optimization) tools.

The top two multi-cloud implementations are, apps siloed on different clouds and DR/failover between clouds. Apps siloed on different clouds increased the most (up to 57 percent from 44 percent year-on-year). Data integration between clouds increased to 45 percent from 37 percent YoY as organizations looked for the best fit for applications and data analysis.

"This is a complex year for cloud adoption. Organizations are navigating economic uncertainties by investing in generative AI, security and sustainability while prioritizing cost management," says Brian Adler, senior director, cloud market strategy at Flexera. "Cloud adoption continues to grow. The shift toward hybrid and multi-cloud environments underscores the importance of comprehensive cost management, with nearly half of all workloads and data now in the public cloud. FinOps practices and cloud centers of excellence are growing as companies move toward centralized, strategic cloud management."

AWS and Azure still lead the cloud market overall. Adoption has grown for AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. 49 percent of respondents report using AWS for significant workloads, while 45 percent report using Azure and 21 percent report using Google Cloud Platform. In contrast, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, IBM and Alibaba Cloud usage is substantially lower and relatively unchanged compared to the previous year.

SMBs are the highest cloud adopters, but fell slightly from the previous year, with 61 percent (a drop from 67 percent last year) of workloads and 60 percent of data in the public cloud for both years.

Nearly all platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings saw a gain in usage, with ML/AI the one getting the most attention from companies experimenting (32 percent) or planning to use it (17 percent).

The full report is available from the Flexera site.

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