Managing business cloud costs is more challenging than ever

Enterprise cloud investments are on the rise despite growing anxieties about their cost, according to a survey from cloud optimization company Flexera.

Its 2023 ‘State of the Cloud’ report, published in March, notes that cutting cloud costs has overtaken security as the main concern for businesses embracing the technology. 

This is natural given the current economic climate, but Flexera predicts that the number of companies moving to the cloud will only increase as things improve.

Enterprise cloud trends

The survey also found that AWS is the favoured cloud storage provider for small businesses, which Flexera defines as those with less than 1,000 employees. 

71% of respondents preferred Amazon Web Services (AWS), while 51 percent preferred Microsoft Azure. Google Cloud Platform use has actually decreased from 43% to 28% year-on-year.

Flexera’s 2022 report noted that Azure adoption rates overall had actually exceeded those of AWS for the first time, and so the latest report indicates a close race between the two. This time, 47% percent of general respondents preferred AWS for their workloads, whereas 41% opted for Azure. 

Oracle, IBM and Alibaba adoption rates have seen little growth and, as a result, it appears that, in the eyes of many, enterprise cloud solutions are very much a two-horse race.

Cloud security concerns haven’t completely fallen by the wayside, though, with multicloud implementations (businesses spreading their cloud investments over multiple services and providers) to augment security continuing to be one of the top implementations of the cloud overall.

The biggest takeaway remains the tension between companies investing in cloud to reduce the cost burden of on-prem solutions such as servers, while being mindful of the cost of a cloud stack. 

Despite the prevalence of multicloud, Flexera’s 2023 report noted that multi-cloud use has decreased by 2% since 2022, while single public cloud usage has risen by the same amount in the same period. With no end to the financial downturn in sight, it can be safely assumed that this trend will continue.

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