Study: Cloud Spend Exceeds Budgets as Covid-19 Spurs Cloud Use

Flexera, an IT management software company based in suburban Chicago, has released a new report suggesting that the use of the cloud has dramatically increased amid the Covid-19 outbreak, and that costs have increased accordingly.

More than half of enterprise respondents to the ninth annual Flexera State of the Cloud Report said their cloud usage will be higher than originally planned at the beginning of the year due to the pandemic. Almost 60% of enterprises expect cloud usage to exceed prior plans due to COVID-19. Organizations are over budget for cloud spend by an average of 23 percent, and expect cloud spend to increase by 47 percent next year.

Companies plan to migrate more services to cloud, despite the fact that they are already exceeding cloud budgets. This is expected to push the emphasis towards optimizing workloads in order to ensure operational efficiency.

According to the survey data, 93% of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy while 87% have a hybrid cloud strategy. Twenty percent of enterprises spend more than $12 million per year on public cloud, and more than 50 percent of enterprise workloads and data are expected to be in a public cloud within 12 months.

The report says 83% of enterprises indicate that security is a challenge, followed by 82 percent for managing cloud spend and 79 percent for governance. For cloud beginners, lack of resources/expertise is the top challenge; for advanced cloud users, managing cloud spend is the top challenge.

The report leveraged a panel of 750 technical professionals from around the globe and across a broad cross-section of industries, providing insight into their adoption of cloud infrastructure. The survey was conducted in the first quarter of 2020.

Channel Impact^®
The survey captures insights into how organizations are progressing in their journey to cloud, which is made even more important due to the global pandemic and the widespread need to work from home.