Flexera 2024 State of the Cloud: Managing Cloud Spending is the Top Challenge of Cloud Computing, while AI, FinOps, Security and Sustainability Demand Attention

The 2024 report is available at https://www.flexera.com/stateofthecloud.

“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,” said 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.”

Among the highlights:

• Managing cloud spending remains the top challenge over security: This year marks the second year in which managing cloud spending is the top challenge facing organizations. As in previous years, there needs to be more resources/expertise. More than a quarter of respondents spend over $12 million a year on cloud (29%), and nearly quarter (22%) spend that much on SaaS.
• Organizations are embracing multi-cloud: Respondents saw a slight increase in multi-cloud usage, up from 87% last year to 89% this year.
• Enterprises turn to multi-cloud FinOps and security tools: Sixty-one percent of large enterprises use multi-cloud security, and 57% use multi-cloud FinOps (cost optimization) tools.
• Siloed apps and disaster recovery (DR)/failover are the top multi-cloud implementations: The top two multi-cloud implementations are: apps siloed on different clouds, DR/failover between clouds. Apps siloed on different clouds increased the most (up to 57% from 44% YoY). Data integration between clouds increased to 45% from 37% YoY as organizations looked for the best fit for applications and data analysis.
• AWS and Azure still lead overall: Adoption grew for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Forty-nine percent of respondents reported using AWS for significant workloads, while 45% reported using Azure and 21% reported 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.
• Cloud faces headwinds with small and medium-sized businesses: SMBs are the highest cloud adopters, but fell off slightly from the previous year, with 61% (a drop from 67% last year) of workloads and 60% of data in the public cloud for both years.
• There are big plans for AI: Nearly all platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings saw a gain in usage, with the most prominent being in the data warehouse (up to 65% from 56% YoY). Container-as-a-service (52%) and serverless (function-as-a-service) (48%) are both up nine percentage points this year. Machine learning/artificial intelligence (ML/AI) had a modest gain at 41%, up from 36% last year. However, ML/AI is the PaaS offering getting the most attention from companies experimenting (32%) or planning to use it (17%).
• Sustainability trails cost optimization: Forty-eight percent of respondents say they already have defined sustainability initiatives that include tracking the carbon footprint of cloud usage. When asked how sustainability compares to cost optimization, 59% prioritized cost optimization, though an additional 29% say that both cloud cost optimization and sustainability are equally prioritized.

The survey tapped 753 IT professionals and executive leaders worldwide, representing a broad cross-section of industries and context areas, in the winter of 2023. Flexera sources participants from a rigorously maintained independent panel comprised of vetted respondents with detailed profiles.