Key Findings from Flexera’s 2021 State of the Cloud report
Cloud computing adoption was expanding rapidly even before the COVID-19. The urgent changes to business operations and procedure caused organization plans and adoption to increase at an even greater rate.
According to Flexera’s 2021 State of the Cloud report, organizations are rapidly progressing their journey to cloud. The report found that public cloud spending is now a significant line item in IT budgets, especially among enterprise organizations (31%) that said they spent more than $12 million a year on public cloud services.
The survey polled 750 “cloud decision-makers and users” from organizations ranging from 100 employees to more than 10,000 employees around the world and across a cross-section of organizations. It specifically asked about services run on AWS, Microsoft Azure, GCP, VMware Cloud on AWS, IBM Public Cloud, Oracle Infrastructure Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud.
AWS continues to be the leading cloud service provider with 79% of enterprise respondents saying they use the platform and 9% saying they are “experimenting” with AWS. Microsoft’s Azure was used by 76% of respondents. 11% of respondents said they are experimenting with Azure.
Azure adoption increased among all respondents in 2020. It increased from 63% last year to 73% this year. By comparison, AWS’ year-over-year growth was just 1 percentage point to 77%.
While AWS and Azure are compete for the #1 cloud service provider, GCP saw the strongest growth among the top three, growing from 34% usage last year to 49% usage this year. Additionally, GCP and VMware Cloud on AWS reported the highest number of respondents experimenting on their platforms, which the Flexera report says could drive future cloud adoption.
The following are some of the responses of interest:
Enterprises embrace multi-cloud:
• 92 percent of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy; 80 percent have a hybrid cloud strategy
• 49 percent silo workloads by cloud, with 45 percent integrating data between clouds
• Only 42 percent of all participating organizations use multi-cloud management tools
• Respondents use an average of 2.6 public and 2.7 private clouds
Public cloud adoption continues to accelerate:
• 36 percent of enterprises spend more than $12 million per year on public clouds
• 55 percent of enterprise workloads are expected to be in a public cloud within twelve months
• 90 percent of respondents who answered a question about COVID-19 expect cloud use to exceed plans due to the pandemic
• The top challenge in cloud migration is understanding application dependencies
Understanding cloud initiatives and metrics:
• 61 percent of organizations plan to optimize cloud costs in 2021, making it the top initiative for the fifth year in a row
• 59 percent of organizations plan to focus on cloud migration
• 76 percent of organizations use cost efficiency and savings to measure cloud progress
Organizations are taking a centralized approach to cloud:
• 77 percent of enterprises have a central cloud team or cloud center of excellence (CoE)
• 54 percent of cloud teams are responsible for governing infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS)/ platform-as-a-service (PaaS) usage and costs
• 63 percent of enterprises reported using cloud managed service providers (MSPs) to manage public cloud use
The Flexera survey found that it remains difficult to map all of the relationships across applications, hardware, and networking devices for each service, especially in a rapidly evolving environment. Just over half of respondents reported understanding application dependencies as the top cloud migration challenge.
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Selected Charts from the Flexera 2021 Cloud Report:
References:
https://info.flexera.com/CM-REPORT-State-of-the-Cloud
https://techblog.comsoc.org/2021/02/10/oracele-expands-cloud-portfolio-key-themes-for-cloud-in-2021/
https://techblog.comsoc.org/2021/03/01/ibms-cloud-satellite-service-in-generally-available-orbit/
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Reinhardt Krause of Investors Business Daily:
Cloud Computing: Amazon Leads In Data Center Spending:
Based on first-quarter earnings reports, 2021 is shaping up as another big year for cloud capital spending. But again, it’s still largely guesswork for analysts.
Take Amazon Web Services (AWS), the biggest provider of cloud computing services. Its March-quarter capital spending blew past estimates, jumping 78% to $12.1 billion from a year earlier.
Not all of that was cloud-related, though. Some of that went toward Amazon’s fulfillment centers, logistics and product distribution network.
Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty addressed the issue in a recent note to clients:
“Estimates from (market researcher) Dell’Oro suggest that the three other major U.S. hyperscalers (Facebook (FB), Google and Microsoft) spend between 60% and 80% of total capex on (cloud computing) data centers and related infrastructure equipment, much higher than Amazon given its growing logistics and fulfillment spend,” Huberty said. “Quarterly capex trends for Amazon have become a less effective indicator of data center spend compared to the other three U.S. hyperscalers.”
Amazon: Cloud Revenue Grows 30% In 2020
But for all of 2020, Amazon’s capital spending boomed 138% to more than $40.1 billion, said a Bank of America report. Google’s overall capital spending dipped 5% to $22.3 billion while Microsoft’s total capital spending rose 30% to $17.6 billion, said BofA.
The three biggest cloud computing services continue to gain share vs. rivals such as IBM (IBM) and Oracle (ORCL), analysts say. But whether they’re making significant profit — or any profit at all — based on what they spend is unclear.
AWS cloud revenue rose 30% to $45.4 billion in 2020. Microsoft’s Azure cloud business climbed 50% to $24.7 billion. Google’s cloud revenue, including Workspace office software, rose 46% to $13.1 billion. To stay on top, the cloud titans aim to make sure they can meet growing customer demand.
Their customers rent computer processing power and data storage by the hour, week or month.
Another Set Of Cloud Titans:
Bank of America has its own group of cloud computing titans that includes China’s Alibaba Group (BABA), Baidu (BIDU) and Tencent Holdings (TCEHY) as well as Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Amazon stock.
It forecasts that 2021 cloud capital spending by those seven companies will rise 20% to $128.3 billion vs. 37% growth in 2020.
Dell’Oro, in a March 17 press release, forecast that “hyperscale,” cloud data center capital spending will rise 20% in 2021. However, Dell ‘Oro didn’t provide a dollar figure or list the companies involved in the forecast. Dell’Oro did not respond to an email requesting more information.
https://www.investors.com/news/technology/cloud-computing-are-spending-but-how-much/