Foundry’s new study also found data privacy and security as top challenges when implementing a cloud strategy

 Foundry (formerly IDG Communications), the global leader in media, martech and data for the tech community, today released its 2022 Cloud Computing Survey. In its 9th year, the research was conducted to measure cloud computing trends among technology decision makers, including usage and top growth areas, investments, business drivers and shifting services and applications to the cloud.

“The rapid digitization that has taken place over the past two years continues to move forward and cloud adoption is a major component,” said Stacey Raap, Marketing & Research Manager, Foundry. “Our new Cloud Computing Survey echoes this sentiment and makes it clear that cloud adoption will continue to accelerate, but not without challenges that must be addressed along the way.”

Key findings from this year’s Cloud Computing Survey are as follows, with further details below:

• IT decision-makers (ITDMs) are beginning to default to cloud-based services when upgrading or purchasing new technical capabilities.
• Organizations have seen sustainable revenue growth due to cloud solutions and will spend an average of $78M on cloud computing initiatives over the next 12 months.
• When implementing their cloud strategy, ITDMs are running into challenges such as controlling cloud costs, data privacy and security challenges, and lack of cloud security skills/expertise.

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Cloud solutions are front and center

According to Foundry’s report – which surveyed ITDMs in North America, EMEA, and APAC – more than two-thirds (69%) of respondents agree that their organization has accelerated migration to the cloud over the past 12 months. This number increases to 76% for enterprise organizations, but lessens (64%) for those at SMBs. When asked about the top cloud growth areas, more than half of ITDMs stated Software-as-a-Service (52%), followed by Platform-as-a-Service (38%), Security-as-a-Service (37%), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (36%) and cloud-based analytics (33%). Cloud-based analytics rises to 38% for enterprise organizations compared to 29% for SMBs.

The report also found that half of ITDMs said their organization’s total IT environment is “some on cloud but mostly on-premises,” while over a third (34%) is “mostly cloud but some on-premises,” and 7% is “all cloud.” However, over the next 18 months, this is expected to shift in favor of cloud, with 46% of respondents saying their organization’s total IT environment will be “mostly cloud but some on-premises,” and 17% will be “all cloud.”

“Although enterprise businesses are leading the charge, SMBs aren’t far behind when it comes to cloud migration,” added Raap. “As more organizations move their organizations towards fully being in the cloud, IT teams will need the proper talent and resources to manage their cloud infrastructure and overcome any security and privacy hurdles that come with being in the cloud.”

Looking at the status of hybrid or multicloud intentions, 36% of respondents say they are currently evaluating or researching a hybrid or multicloud approach. Almost one-fifth (19%) of organizations are in the process of deploying a hybrid architecture, whereas 10% have fully-deployed a hybrid cloud architecture and are not deploying multicloud. When it comes to multicloud architecture, 11% said they are in the process of deploying one and 7% said they have already fully deployed a multicloud architecture.

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Cloud is positively impacting revenue but has challenges

Cloud computing technologies continue to prove successful, as three out of five (60%) ITDMs state that cloud capabilities have helped their organization achieve sustainable revenue growth over the past 12 months. This number increases to 64% for enterprises and 58% for SMBs. The research also shows that on average, organizations will allocate almost one-third (32%) of their total IT budget to cloud computing with the total average spend being $78M over the next 12 months, up from $73M in 2020.

The top business objectives driving cloud investments are: enabling disaster recovery and business continuity (40%), replacing on-premise legacy technology (39%), lowering total cost of ownership (34%), improving employee productivity (33%) and greater flexibility to react to changing market conditions (32%).

However, adoption of emerging technologies like the cloud comes with challenges:

• When it comes to implementing a cloud strategy, top challenges are controlling cloud costs (36%), data privacy and security challenges (35%) and lack of cloud security skills/expertise (34%).
• When asked what ITDMs needed most from their future or current cloud providers, leading the list is security expertise (41%), followed by better cloud management capabilities (40%) and cost management capabilities (38%).