Dive Brief:

• The public cloud is the dominant cloud deployment option, used by more than 61% of organizations, according to a survey of almost 1,300 technology professionals from learning and training provider O'Reilly. The survey was conducted in January and released this month.  

• Half of respondents use on-prem deployments and 39% rely on the hybrid cloud, according to O'Reilly data. More than half of respondents use multiple cloud services. 

• Amazon Web Services remains the industry cloud leader, according to O'Reilly data. More than two-thirds of respondents rely on AWS, almost half use Microsoft Azure and 32% use Google Cloud Platform. 

Dive Insight:

The survey offers a glimpse of cloud intentions pre-pandemic, investments subject to change given budget constraints or the pause of large-scale projects. 

For many organizations, the coronavirus fast-forwarded technology plans, accelerating adoption plans from years or months to weeks or days.

O'Reilly's data snapshot from the start of 2020 indicates an aggressive portfolio shift. More than 90% of O'Reilly respondents planned to increase their cloud-based infrastructure. And one-quarter of those surveyed expected to move 100% of applications to the cloud this year. 

Reflection on 2020 will highlight how companies treated cloud portfolios and adoption. Current indicators do not provide a clear picture of what is to come.​

The cloud market is thriving after Q1, remaining in growth mode even as companies become conservative with technology spending. 

One of the concerns for business is that cloud spending is critical to business operations. As infrastructure spending moved from CapEx to OpEx, cloud costs became a monthly expense, one that's not easy to turn off. 

Managing costs is a challenge in the cloud arena. In the public cloud services space, which includes infrastructure and platform as a service, Forrester offers different budget management tips to manage costs​, depending on a company's state: 

• If an organization is in "survival mode," companies can shut down dev/test environments on IaaS and stop running apps not critical to business operations. Such efforts would drop cloud platform spend 10%. 

• If in "adaptive mode," Forrester recommends prioritizing customer-facing apps and expanding public cloud services spend by 5%. 

• If a company is in "growth mode," Forrester recommends growing total platform spend by 15%, focusing on customer-facing apps and new applications development.