Enterprises have rapidly adopted Cloud Computing solutions and services, consistently over the past thirty months or so. This now comes as little surprise, as enterprises are now shifting their focus on how optimally are they leveraging Cloud Computing solutions.
Following the same spirit, Flexera 2022 State of the Cloud Report delivers useful insights on how enterprises are currently leveraging the Cloud, and what are the areas which still need the attention of top IT decision makers across organizations.
The sample size for this eleventh edition of the annual Flexera survey comprises of 753 respondents, which participated in the study just around the end of year 2021. So, we can also consider these findings as a sort of recap of the Cloud related trends in 2021.
In this post, we will discuss the highlights of the survey, and also crunch a few numbers that have emerged from this elaborate survey.
Multi Cloud – The Go To Cloud Deployment Model
Interestingly, multi cloud has retained its spot as the top choice of enterprises when it comes to cloud deployment models. 89% of the respondents pointed towards a multi cloud strategy that was already in place within their organization.
Out of these 89% enterprises, a sizable chunk of 80% respondents were pursuing Hybrid Cloud strategies. A hybrid cloud deployment combines the facets of a private as well as public cloud environment.
Related: The Trend of Cloud Adoption to Retain its Momentum in 2022
Public Cloud Drives IT Spending
According to the survey, the Public Cloud is emerging as the main driver of IT spending across the respondent organizations. A notable 37% of the respondent organizations were spending north of US $12 Million annually on public cloud services and deployments.
80% of the respondents declared their public cloud spending to be around the US $1.2 Million. For the purpose of this survey, organizations with 1,000 or lesser employees were classified as Small to Medium Businesses, or SMBs.
However, one of the most surprising stats of this survey was that 53% of the SMBs were spending more than US $1.2 MN annually over the Cloud. By the year 2020, the ratio of SMBs with a cloud spending north of US $1.2 Million was a modest 38%.
Related: Hybrid Work Will Drive the Demand for DaaS and VDI
Optimizing Cloud Spending and Costs
The actual spending on the public cloud, on average, was 13% higher as compared to the budgeted costs. During the year 2022, it is expected that on average, the total spend on cloud solutions and services could exceed 29% of the budgeted costs.
Well, this is one good news that needs to be absorbed by some degree of concern as well. At the end of the day, one of the core ideas behind cloud migration is cost optimization. This issue needs to be addressed in a two dimensional manner.
The first aspect of this issue is the forecasting process of cloud related costs. As enterprises increasingly move to the cloud, it is quite natural that IT spending will also increase. The other aspect of this issue requires even more importance.
Some Cloud Service Providers (CSP) tend to separately bill tenant organizations for stuff like Customer Support, Backups, Data Migration or Bandwidth Charges. Well, this is an area where leading Cloud Service Provider (CSP) dinCloud stands out of from the rest.
dinCloud’s best in class cloud computing services are offered as per a Flat Rate Pricing Model, which means not only will your costs be known beforehand, but there will also be no unwelcome surprises or hidden charges in your monthly cloud bill.
Related: The Year 2022 Could Mark the Beginning of Industry Clouds
Under Utilization of Cloud Resources
While we have just discussed cloud spending exceeding the budgeted figures, there is also another issue highlighted in the survey. It was estimated that nearly 32% of the provisioned cloud resources during the year 2021 remained unused, or underutilized.
During the year 2020, this percentage of under-utilized cloud resources stood at 30%, which is still high on many counts. At the end of the day, enterprises need to be mindful of how much cloud resources they provision, and how much they actually end up using.
Related: How to Leverage Virtual Workspaces to the Max?
Conclusion
The Flexera survey conveys very useful insights about the global Cloud Computing market. The trend of cloud adoption remained strong in 2021, and is likely to remain as such in the year 2022 as well.
However, the two areas where organizations will need to up their game is the forecasting part of cloud costs, and how efficiently they actually use the cloud resources they have provisioned from various Cloud Service Providers (CSP).
Contact dinCloud, an ATSG company, for instantly scalable cloud solutions, so you can scale up or down, on the fly, as your business needs change.
