Undertaking Cloud investments are growing despite growing concerns about their costs, according to a survey conducted by cloud optimization company Flexera.
His “cloud state” in 2023 report (opens in a new tab)published in March, notes this cloud cost cutting overtook security as the top concern for companies using this technology.
This is natural given the current economic climate, but Flexera predicts that the number of companies moving to the cloud will increase as the situation improves.
Enterprise Cloud Trends
The study also found AWS to be the cloud storage provider of choice for small businesses, which Flexera defines as those with fewer than 1,000 employees.
71% of respondents preferred Amazon Web Services (AWS) and 51% preferred Microsoft Azure. Google Cloud Platform usage dropped from 43% to 28% year-on-year.
Flexera 2022 report (opens in a new tab) noted that Azure’s overall adoption rates actually surpassed those of AWS for the first time, so the latest report points to a close race between the two. This time, 47% of all respondents preferred AWS for their workloads, while 41% chose Azure.
The adoption rates of Oracle, IBM and Alibaba all saw slight gains, and as a result, it seems that in the eyes of many, enterprise cloud solutions are a two-horse race.
Cloud security issues haven’t completely gone away though, as multi-cloud implementations (companies spread their cloud investments across multiple services and providers) for increased security continue to be one of the best cloud implementations.
The biggest difference remains the tension between companies investing in the cloud to reduce the cost of on-prem solutions such as servers while also factoring in the cost of the cloud stack.
Despite the proliferation of multicloud, a 2023 Flexera report noted that multicloud usage has decreased by 2% since 2022, while single public cloud usage has increased by the same amount over the same period. With no end in sight for the financial crisis, it is safe to assume that this trend will continue.