2022 State of the Cloud Report by Flexera

Flexera announces the release of its Flexera 2022 State of the Cloud Report. The eleventh annual State of the Cloud Report explores the thinkingof 753 respondents from a survey conducted in late 2021. 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.

The report found that today’s top challenges for organizations of all sizes are security, managing cloud spend and lack of resources or expertise. Understanding current cloud computing trends can help guide an organization’s digital business decision-making process, vendor and technology selection, cost forecasting and investment strategies to support upcoming stages of a cloud journey. The full survey results are available in the Flexera 2022 State of the Cloud Report, which can be downloaded here.

“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.”

The Flexera 2022 State of the Cloud Report survey captured insights into the growing reliance on Microsoft Azure, the move toward the use of native tooling and the massive uptake of cloud among small to midsized businesses. 

Among the 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. Respondents estimate organizations waste 32 percent of cloud spend.
• Microsoft Azure usage surpasses AWS:  In several instances in the 2022 survey, Microsoft Azure usage met or exceeded that of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and in the case of private clouds, VMware. Azure passed AWS in the percentage of enterprises currently 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. AWS Cloud Formation templates (50 percent) and Azure Resource Manager templates (48 percent) are the configuration tools most widely adopted by respondents. 
• Growth of SMB cloud usage: Cloud spend by SMBs reflects a massive uptake with 52 percent of SMBs spending more than $1.2 million-up from 38 percent reported in 2021. SMBs are moving quickly to the public cloud. Sixty-three percent of SMB workloads and 62 percent of data will reside in a public cloud within the next 12 months

The report leveraged a panel of 753 technical and business professionals from around the world and across a broad cross-section of organizations, who shared insights into their adoption of cloud infrastructure and services. Participants in the survey are sourced from a respondent pool that is independent from Flexera customers and prospects. The independent panel is rigorously maintained and comprised of vetted respondents with detailed profiles.

The survey was conducted in the fourth quarter of 2021.

Complete results and highlights are available in the Flexera 2022 State of the Cloud Report. The report results are made available under an Open-Source Creative Commons License so the data may be freely shared with the required attribution.