The Flexera 2022 State of the Cloud Report surveyed 753 technical and business professionals around the world to glean insights into their adoption of cloud infrastructure and services. It brings crucial statistics into the changing market trends surrounding cloud infrastructure around the world. Responders within the report consist of professionals from a wide variety of industries, verticals, and positions. 79% of organizations that took part in this survey employ at least 1,000 people and 31% employ over 10,000 people. The respondents come from industries such as tech services (22%), financial services (20%), software and hardware (17%), and healthcare (10%). Other industries, such as retail and e-commerce, consumer products and services, education/government, and others make up less than 5% of respondents. Additionally, 73% of the respondents work closely with the cloud, as either IT/Operations (44%) or cloud architects (29%).

Here is a comprehensive breakdown of the report and the top lessons for businesses interested in cloud computing.

Top 8 Findings from the Report

Respondents were limited to employees who worked in organizations with 250 or more employees and were likely to be familiar with cloud technology.

1. A Rise in Heavy Cloud Users

   With a need to remain competitive in our ever-growing digital world, cloud adoption continues to increase. This report shows a rise in heavy users (defined as users currently running more than 25% of workloads in the cloud) moving 53% in 2020 to 59% in 2021 to 63% in 2022.

2. Multi-Cloud Remains the Top Choice

   Though there is an increase in single public and multiple private, the multi-cloud solution remains the go-to option for 89% of organizations surveyed. Of these organizations, 80% take the hybrid approach, combining the use of both public and private clouds. The report revealed that all respondents use at least one public or private cloud with 96% using at least one public cloud and 84% using at least one private cloud.

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3. Cloud Spend Increasing Across the Board

   Organizations of different sizes have increased their use of the public cloud and the amount of money spent on it, making it now a significant line item in IT budgets. More than 50% of respondents spend over $2.4 million on the public cloud each year. Larger enterprises spend more than this median price, with 37% reporting a spend over $12 million yearly and 80% reportedly spending upwards of $1.2 million per year. The spend for SMBs is much less given that they run fewer and smaller workloads. 22% of SMBs spend less than $600,000 per annum, while 53% spend more than $1.2 million annually. These figures for enterprises and SMBs are not surprising as respondents are running 50% of their workloads and 48% of their organizations’ data is in a public cloud. Both the workload and the data in the public cloud are expected to increase to 56% and 55%, respectively, in the next twelve months.

4. More Cloud Workloads with Sensitive Data

   As the popularity of cloud usage and the confidence in the security tools and processes of cloud providers increase, organizations are reconsidering their previous stance on moving sensitive data to the public cloud. Over 50% of respondents said they will consider moving at least some of their sensitive consumer data or corporate financial data to the cloud.

5. A Few Challenges Remain

   Security still remains a major challenge with cloud usage. Currently a top challenge for 85% of respondents, security has been the major challenge in ten out of eleven State of the Cloud reports.

   Other challenges facing respondents are a lack of resources/expertise (83%), managing cloud spend (81%), governance (77%), managing software licenses (76%), compliance (76%), central cloud team/business unit responsibility balancing (73%), cloud migration (73%), and managing multi-cloud (71%).

   The biggest mover on this list was the lack of resources/expertise that moved from the fourth position in 2021 to second this year for enterprises and SMBs. This results from the expansion of organizations’ cloud footprint and subsequent increase in demand for skilled staff.

6. Companies Struggling with Optimizing Cloud Spend

   Organizations still struggle to control cloud spend, with the report showing that public cloud spend was over budget by 13%. It is expected to further increase by 29% in the next twelve months. A major contributor to this rising cost is wasted cloud spend. Respondents self-estimated that their organizations waste 32% of the cloud spend. While organizations could use provider discounts to reduce costs, the number of respondents showing that they’re using these discounts has dropped. In 2021, 52% of AWS users stated they used AWS reserved instances, and 44% used AWS savings plans.

   However, these figures had dropped to 36% and 31% respectively. Many organizations are also using automation to reduce costs. Over 40% use automated policies to shut down workloads after hours and to rightsize underutilized instances.

   Related: App Modernization: Innovation, Security, and Cost Savings

7. Containerization Becoming Even More Common (But Challenges Still Exist)

   The survey showed that container use continues to grow in popularity. This year AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS) and AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) sailed past Docker for the top spot at 47%. Docker remains near the top at 43%, followed by Kubernetes at 42%. The report shows a growing interest in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), with 29% of organizations planning on using one of these provider-specific, purpose-built tools. For container usage, the top challenge according to 42% of respondents is the lack of internal staff with expertise.

   Other challenges include ensuring security (34%), migrating traditional applications to containers (31%), ensuring compliance, managing containerized environments (25%), lack of service providers with expertise (25%), tracking software licenses use in containers (23%), deciding on container platform (19%), and optimizing cost of containers (18%).

8. Use of Public Cloud PaaS is Increasing

   Another key finding in this report is that the use of public cloud PaaS is increasing. The top three services currently being used are data warehouse (55%), relational database-as-a-service (DBaaS) (49%), and container-as-a-service (44%). The growing interest in using containers to quicken deployment, scale operations, and increase the efficiency of workloads running in the cloud is pushing organizations towards using PaaS services from cloud providers.

   This has led to 47% of respondents experimenting with or planning to use DRaaS and Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence (46%). Overall enterprises use PaaS services more than SMBs, largely because as organizations rely more heavily on the cloud, they better appreciate the operational burden these services eliminate.

Wrapping Up

As the world settles into a new normal, post-pandemic world, businesses must adjust their approach to cloud usage and management. This report highlights the need for organizations to make strategic decisions about cloud architecture, usage of public clouds, effective tooling, and cloud cost management. It also highlights how quickly enterprises are adopting cloud computing. To remain competitive, organizations must handle the complexities of the cloud proactively and decisively. However, without the right cloud partner, this can be a tricky task to manage. This is where working with certified cloud engineers becomes the best option.

D3V Tech is home to a team of cloud migration officers, certified cloud engineers, and developers who have helped countless businesses digitally transform themselves. Get in touch with one of our cloud migration officers today to develop your own cloud migration roadmap and ensure a smooth and successful journey to the cloud.