With cloud spending expected to increase by 28 percent in the coming year, a new poll of over 750 technical professionals and executive leaders worldwide finds that 84 percent see managing cloud spend as their top challenge.

The study from Flexera shows 33 percent of organisations are spending more than $12 million annually on the public cloud alone partly driven by AI adoption. With cloud budgets already exceeding limits by 17 percent, organisations are increasingly turning to managed service providers (60 percent) and expanding use of their FinOps teams to regain control over spending (59 percent).

While estimated wasted cloud spend is falling, the adoption of AI-related public cloud services is rising. In addition to a surge in the use of data warehouse services (76 percent) — often leveraged to feed AI models — generative AI public cloud service use is booming with 72 percent of organisations reportedly using the technology either extensively or sparingly, as compared to 47 percent in 2024.

“AI is in its prime with no indication of losing momentum,” says Jay Litkey, senior vice president of cloud and FinOps at Flexera and governing board member at the FinOps Foundation. “I suspect we’ll see further acceleration of AI use as more organisations embrace their own AI investments and technology vendors introduce agentic AI into their existing toolsets. To stay on budget and accurately forecast for future needs, organisations need to fine-tune how to track and manage their cloud spend and use with FinOps now — or risk a significantly wasted investment.”

Some organisations are moving their workloads back to non-cloud environments (their own datacenters and/or co-located/hosted environments). While this is beginning to happen, only a minority (21 percent) of cloud workloads have currently been repatriated.

Sustainability is a factor too, 57 percent of respondents report they have, or plan to have, a defined sustainability initiative in place within a year, including carbon footprint tracking of cloud use. However, ​saving money is still top of mind given 57 percent saying cost optimisation takes priority over sustainability.

The 2025 State of the Cloud report is available from the Flexera site.

The UK’s largest NHS management body has postponed the replacement of its aging Oracle finance system again following more than three years of delays.

The Integrated Single Financial Environment (ISFE) processes around £170 billion ($211 billion) in health spending every year for NHS England, which is responsible for running the health service in England.

Plans to upgrade the Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2 system have been afoot since 2018, when the quango under the Department of Health and Social Care said the replacement would go live in April 2021.

An NHS England spokesperson confirmed that a revised go-live date of April 2024 had been missed.

“A decision was taken to extend the planning and testing for this highly complex critical national infrastructure and a revised launch date in 2025 for the new system will be communicated shortly,” they said.

“The current system and service continue to operate as normal and we remain committed to the successful delivery of this next-generation national finance system, ensuring that services, the system, and users are operationally ready for its arrival.”

In its annual report for 2023-24, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority, a UK government projects watchdog, said NHS England’s project to upgrade ISFE had been rated red, meaning “successful delivery of the project appears to be unachievable.”

“The project may need re-scoping and/or its overall viability reassessed,” said the report published last month.

The IPA report said the new finance system would support the NHS England Group of organizations, consisting of 42 Integrated Care Boards (ICBs), four Commissioning Support Units (CSUs), NHS England, and a provider organization with annual funding of £170 billion.

The data published with the IPA report said: “Following recommendations from a Red Gate 0 report in February 2024, an action plan is under development and the program is undergoing a re-planning exercise to determine a new go-live date.”

Data from the 2020-21 IPA report said NHS England had planned to go live with the system in April 2024.

In December 2022, NHS England awarded the £108 million ($134 million) ISFE contract – without competition – to the incumbent supplier, NHS Shared Business Services, a joint venture between the NHS and French outsourcer Sopra Steria.

The procurement process began in 2018, when a prior information notice (PIN), designed to gather intelligence from suppliers before the formal competition started, priced the project at £200 million ($248 million) and said that a contract notice would be published by March 18, 2019.

In April 2021, NHS England was forced to extend the contract with NHS Shared Business Services for the ISFE to accommodate delays to the procurement, at a cost of £59.2 million ($73.3 million).

“The ISFE re-procurement project is a large and complex project which will deliver a replacement for the current service,” the procurement document said. “During the planning stages for the re-procurement, it was identified that short-term uncertainties regarding Group structure posed significant challenges to finalising a tender specification during 2019 with a view to implementing a replacement service by April 2021. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has meant that the project team and other key colleagues have had to focus their resources on keeping critical business processes running and work on the procurement of the new contract has inevitably been delayed.”

NHS England decided to go to market for an HR and payroll system in a separate £2 billion ($2.48 billion) competition, which it launched in August 2021. That month, NHS England missed a deadline in the procurement of the ISFE system.

In the meantime, NHS England decided to go to market for a separate HR system and a new electronic staff records system in a procurement that could be worth up to £1.7 billion ($2.1 billion).

The ISFE runs on Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2 and is expected to migrate to Oracle Fusion Cloud Financials. With the new system, NHS England anticipates a new cloud-based finance service that is capable of integrating the ERP platform with technologies and automated processes to exploit the “unique benefits of cloud-based services.”