Flexera Report is showing the path towards strategies of using cloud spend data

Flexera has released the eleventh annual  Flexera 2022 State of the Cloud Report. The report found that the increasing use of the public cloud is driving up cloud spending for organizations of all sizes, and public cloud spend is now a significant line item in IT budgets. Wasted cloud spending remains a major issue as respondents self-estimated that their organizations waste 32 percent of cloud spend. Procurement professionals with experience negotiating contracts can leverage cloud spending and usage data to optimize contracts with cloud providers. This is an opportunity for organizations that leverage SAM, vendor management, and FinOps teams in cloud cost management. This year, 17 percent of SAM and vendor management teams optimized cloud spend, up from seven percent last year.

"To maintain their pace of digital transformation, organizations must have the cloud play a significant role in their strategy," said Brian Adler, Senior Director, Cloud Market Strategy at Flexera. "The cloud helps enterprises scale, be more agile, increase revenue and achieve business goals. We've seen that cloud adoption has been expanding for the past few years, with a great acceleration by the pandemic. However, in the post-pandemic world that we're shaping, we're seeing new trends coming into focus."

Among the report's highlights:

• The need for FinOps grows: Cloud costs continue to grow, and the amount of waste remains high. Numerous roles, including IT/Ops, cloud centers of excellence, and FinOps teams, are seeking to keep costs down. Organizations are over budget for cloud spend by an average of 13 percent and expect cloud spend to increase by 29 percent next year
• Microsoft Azure usage surpasses AWS: In several instances in the 2022 survey, Microsoft Azure usage met or exceeded that of Amazon Web Services (AWS).  Azure passed AWS in the percentage of enterprises using it (80 percent Azure vs. 77 percent AWS) and surpassed AWS in the number of virtual machines (VMs) enterprises are running: 71 percent of enterprises are running more than 51 VMs on Azure, compared to 69 percent for AWS
• Native tooling gains traction: Third-party tools that assist in areas such as orchestration and container management seem to be losing ground to native tooling from the cloud providers themselves. For example, AWS Cloud Formation templates (50 percent) and Azure Resource Manager templates (48 percent) are the configuration tools most widely adopted by respondents

For more information on the Flexera 2022 State of the Cloud Report:

• Download the report here
• Sign up for the reporting webinar here