Flexera Cloud Report: Economic Uncertainty Refocuses Priorities

Flexera, an Itasca, Illinois-based SaaS-based IT management company, has released its 2023 State of the Cloud Report. Among the highlights, managing cloud spend has overtaken security as the top cloud challenge, according to the report. As in previous years, a lack of resources/expertise also continues to be a significant challenge.

Economic uncertainty is growing cloud usage. Nearly half (45 percent) of respondents said economic uncertainty would have very little impact on cloud usage and spend; nine percent said they would lower cloud spending somewhat, and one percent said they would lower cloud spending significantly.

“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.”

Optimizing existing use of cloud is the top initiative. This is the seventh year in a row that optimizing existing use of the cloud (cost savings) is the top initiative (reported by 62 percent of all respondents).

Respondents indicated a slight drift toward single public cloud usage, with multi-cloud decreasing from 89 percent last year to 87 percent this year. Single public cloud usage has increased to 11 percent, up from nine percent last year. 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 percent using multi-cloud FinOps tools and 63 percent 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 percent year over year).

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.

The twelfth annual Flexera State of the Cloud Report explores the thinking of 750 respondents from a survey conducted in late 2022. It highlights year-over-year (YoY) changes to help identify trends. The respondents—cloud decision-makers and users from around the world—revealed their experiences and insights about the public, private and multi-cloud market.

Channel Impact^®
The findings can be useful to channel partners in determining where to place their sales emphasis during the current year and beyond.