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Top Cloud Initiative: Optimizing Existing Use of Cloud

Optimizing existing use of cloud is the top initiative — for the seventh year in a row, reported by 62% of respondents in the Flexera 2023 State of the Cloud Report.

"This is a watershed year for cloud usage, as the report findings demonstrate," said Brian Adler, Senior Director, Cloud Market Strategy at Flexera. "We saw FinOps continue to gain traction, cost management challenges pass security as the top cloud challenge for the first time, and artificial intelligence (AI) lead all plans and experimentation of public cloud services. As economic uncertainties wane in the months or years to come, companies will continue to lean into the cloud to transform their businesses, with the goal of finding competitive advantages."

Additional highlights of the report:

Managing cloud spend overtakes security as top cloud challenge

This year marks the first time in more than a decade that managing cloud spend has overtaken security as the top challenge facing organizations. As in previous years, a lack of resources/expertise also continues to be a significant challenge.

Organizations embracing multi-cloud

Respondents indicated a slight drift toward single public cloud usage, with multi-cloud decreasing from 89% last year to 87% this year. Single public cloud usage has increased to 11%, up from 9% last year.

Use of multi-cloud tools by large enterprises is higher for FinOps than for security

Across the board for all organizations, multi-cloud security tools continue to lead, followed closely by tools for multi-cloud cost optimization (FinOps). However, large enterprises reverse the order, with 68% using multi-cloud FinOps tools and 63% using multi-cloud security tools.

Siloed apps and disaster recovery (DR)/failover are the top multi-cloud implementations

Apps siloed on different clouds and DR/failover between clouds have remained the top two multi-cloud implementations. Intelligent workload placement is increasing the fastest (up 20% year over year).

AWS and Azure still lead overall

Last year was the first year Azure surpassed AWS in adoption rates, but as shown in the 2023 report respondents indicated AWS is back on top, with 47% using the provider in significant workloads and 41% using Azure. Oracle, IBM and Alibaba cloud services remained relatively unchanged.

AWS leads SMB public cloud adoption

SMBs (businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees) continue to favor AWS over other cloud providers, with 71% using AWS and 51% using Azure. Usage of Google Cloud Platform among SMBs has significantly decreased, from 43% to 28% year over year.

Big plans for AI

Similar to last year, data warehouse is the most commonly used PaaS offering, followed by DBaaS (relational). Machine learning/artificial intelligence is being experimented with more than any other service; not surprisingly, it’s also the leading PaaS offering that is being planned for use.

Economic uncertainty is growing cloud usage

45% of respondents said economic uncertainty would have very little impact on cloud usage and spend; 9% said they would lower cloud spending somewhat, and 1% said they would lower cloud spending significantly.

Methodology: The survey tapped 750 IT professionals and executive leaders worldwide representing a broad cross-section of industries and context areas in the winter of 2022.

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Top Cloud Initiative: Optimizing Existing Use of Cloud

Optimizing existing use of cloud is the top initiative — for the seventh year in a row, reported by 62% of respondents in the Flexera 2023 State of the Cloud Report.

"This is a watershed year for cloud usage, as the report findings demonstrate," said Brian Adler, Senior Director, Cloud Market Strategy at Flexera. "We saw FinOps continue to gain traction, cost management challenges pass security as the top cloud challenge for the first time, and artificial intelligence (AI) lead all plans and experimentation of public cloud services. As economic uncertainties wane in the months or years to come, companies will continue to lean into the cloud to transform their businesses, with the goal of finding competitive advantages."

Additional highlights of the report:

Managing cloud spend overtakes security as top cloud challenge

This year marks the first time in more than a decade that managing cloud spend has overtaken security as the top challenge facing organizations. As in previous years, a lack of resources/expertise also continues to be a significant challenge.

Organizations embracing multi-cloud

Respondents indicated a slight drift toward single public cloud usage, with multi-cloud decreasing from 89% last year to 87% this year. Single public cloud usage has increased to 11%, up from 9% last year.

Use of multi-cloud tools by large enterprises is higher for FinOps than for security

Across the board for all organizations, multi-cloud security tools continue to lead, followed closely by tools for multi-cloud cost optimization (FinOps). However, large enterprises reverse the order, with 68% using multi-cloud FinOps tools and 63% using multi-cloud security tools.

Siloed apps and disaster recovery (DR)/failover are the top multi-cloud implementations

Apps siloed on different clouds and DR/failover between clouds have remained the top two multi-cloud implementations. Intelligent workload placement is increasing the fastest (up 20% year over year).

AWS and Azure still lead overall

Last year was the first year Azure surpassed AWS in adoption rates, but as shown in the 2023 report respondents indicated AWS is back on top, with 47% using the provider in significant workloads and 41% using Azure. Oracle, IBM and Alibaba cloud services remained relatively unchanged.

AWS leads SMB public cloud adoption

SMBs (businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees) continue to favor AWS over other cloud providers, with 71% using AWS and 51% using Azure. Usage of Google Cloud Platform among SMBs has significantly decreased, from 43% to 28% year over year.

Big plans for AI

Similar to last year, data warehouse is the most commonly used PaaS offering, followed by DBaaS (relational). Machine learning/artificial intelligence is being experimented with more than any other service; not surprisingly, it’s also the leading PaaS offering that is being planned for use.

Economic uncertainty is growing cloud usage

45% of respondents said economic uncertainty would have very little impact on cloud usage and spend; 9% said they would lower cloud spending somewhat, and 1% said they would lower cloud spending significantly.

Methodology: The survey tapped 750 IT professionals and executive leaders worldwide representing a broad cross-section of industries and context areas in the winter of 2022.

Hot Topics

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...