Flexera 2023 State of the Cloud Report
Economic concerns don’t slow cloud growth, whilst FinOps increases in priority. AWS and Azure continue to battle over dominance.
Published on 20th March 2023
Economic uncertainty is driving a reduction in corporate spending, but the need for innovation and increased revenues remains high—and the cloud represents an engine of innovation. The Flexera 2023 State of the Cloud Report sheds light on the pressures facing IT professionals and the strategic initiatives they’re utilizing to remain competitive in today’s dynamic and evolving landscape.
Report highlights
Here’s a sample of key findings from this year’s report based on a survey of 750 cloud decision-makers and users from around the world. Scroll to find out more.
Organizations embrace multi-cloud
Public vs. private cloud usage
What public cloud providers does your organization use?
Public cloud services used for all organizations
How is economic uncertainty changing your expected cloud usage and spend?
What are your organization’s top cloud challenges?
Seeking to control stubbornly high cloud costs, many organizations have or plan to create a cloud center of excellence (CCOE) and build mature FinOps practices. Nearly half of survey respondents indicated their organization plans to move from on-premises software to SaaS, and there’s a small but growing subset of businesses that have moved to just a single cloud provider. AWS and Azure continue to lead the pack of cloud providers, further widening the gap with competitors while maintaining a neck-and-neck competition as market leaders.
You can’t innovate in a digital world without the cloud. Although the threat of economic volatility hasn’t slowed cloud adoption or spending, respondents indicate an acute awareness of costs, as indicated by their prioritization of cost control efforts over security for the first time in a decade. Other means of innovation remain top of mind, with nearly half of respondents experimenting with or planning to use machine learning or artificial intelligence.
The Flexera 2023 State of the Cloud Report reveals:
- Organizations are embracing multi-cloud
- Public cloud adoption continues to accelerate
- Cloud initiatives and metrics
- Organizations are taking a centralized approach to the cloud
- Top challenges are security, spend and expertise
- Organizations struggle to control growing cloud spend
- Container use becomes increasingly mainstream
- Adoption of cloud configuration tools is shifting
- Public cloud adoption is evolving
- Use of public cloud PaaS services is increasing
- Private cloud plays an important role
- European spotlight
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.
Flexera sources participants from an independent panel that is rigorously maintained and is comprised of vetted respondents with detailed profiles.
At numerous points throughout the report, we’ve provided our own interpretation of the data as Flexera Points of View.
- SMBs: Businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees
- Enterprises: Organizations with 1,000+ employees
- Large enterprises: Organizations with 10,000+ employees
The full report is available to view and download by providing some basic details to Flexera at https://info.flexera.com/CM-REPORT-State-of-the-Cloud.
