Dive Brief:
- Executives are pushing for post-optimization migrations this year, according to a Thursday report from SaaS provider Wanclouds. More than half of 500 IT decision-makers surveyed said they’ve been directed to increase cloud spending in 2024.
- More robust cost controls have helped justify additional spend. Nearly half of respondents said they now assess deployments every few days or weeks. Last year’s survey revealed that nearly half of companies allowed far more time to pass between assessments, as much as six to 12 months.
- Enterprises are leaning on cloud to supercharge innovation, streamline software development processes and facilitate the adoption of new technologies, including generative AI, the report noted.
Dive Insight:
A lingering economic downturn tested the resilience of global cloud spending last year, driving widespread optimization, delaying some deployments and cutting into year-over-year hyperscaler revenue growth.
But dependence on the technology, coupled with enthusiasm for emerging generative AI capabilities, drove usage ever upward. Gartner expects this trajectory will push public cloud spend within the range of $700 billion this year.
Enterprises emerged from a period of budgetary scrutiny with renewed allegiance to cloud, but not to any single provider, according to Wanclouds.
Organizations using cloud overwhelmingly favor hybrid and multi-cloud ecosystems, the survey found. Fewer than 1 in 10 respondents are currently deploying on a single private or public cloud.
As executives weigh migration options, IT leaders remain wary of unanticipated spending overruns.
More than two-thirds of respondents acknowledged they’d been hit by unexpected cloud costs in the prior twelve months, a notable year-over-year uptick. Only 53% reported an unwelcome billing surprise in 2022.
The cloud cost learning curve has led many organizations to adopt FinOps practices and reassess existing deployments as they plan new migrations. Over half of respondents told Wanclouds they plan to shift specific workloads back on-prem this year, a move prompted by spending and security concerns.
