Flexera, a provider of software license management solutions, has now published the State of the Cloud Report 2021. The survey of 750 users provides insights into global enterprise cloud usage and examines the long-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on cloud initiatives and spend management.

The most important results at a glance:

- Multi-cloud is establishing itself as a firm strategy in companies: A total of 92% of the companies surveyed use more than one cloud provider. The combination of public and private clouds (hybrid cloud) is also best practice for companies at 80% (2020: 87%). However, the number of clouds has increased compared to the previous year. Instead of two clouds in the previous year, each company now uses an average of around three public clouds and three private clouds.

The most industrially used public cloud providers

© Flexera

- Almost a third of companies (31%) spend more than USD 12 million per year on the public cloud. The three leading cloud providers include Amazon Web Service (AWS) (77%), Microsoft Azure (73%) and Google Cloud (47%). Google once again recorded the highest growth compared to 35% in the previous year and 19% in 2019.
- PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) also remains on a growth trajectory. The most frequently used services include data warehouse (54%), relational database as a service (DBaaS) (50%) and container as a service (45%). They are intended to ensure fast provisioning, flexible scaling and greater efficiency of the workloads executed. Services relating to machine learning/AI (46%), disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) (45%) and edge services (43%), which are still in the test phase, also promise great potential.
- Companies are increasingly moving towards a centralized approach to cloud governance. 75% of companies already have a dedicated cloud team or a "Center of Excellence" (Coe), which is primarily responsible for the use of cloud, IaaS and PaaS as well as IT spending (54%). More than half of companies (63%) also rely on managed service providers (MSPs) for the public cloud.
- Security remains the biggest challenge for companies (81%), closely followed by cloud spend management (79%) and governance (75%). Most companies still lack transparent insight into their IT assets, which is particularly problematic when it comes to cloud migration. Application dependency mapping (51%), the technical feasibility check (48%) and the cost comparison of cloud and on-premise (44%) are particular headaches here.
- Cost-cutting initiatives and the implementation of DevOps are driving the use of containers. Docker is used by 53% and Kubernetes by 48% of companies. Many companies also rely on container-as-a-service offerings, including AWS (ECS/EKS) (51%), Azure (43%) and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) (31%).
- The use of configuration management tools has changed. For standardization and automation, companies primarily rely on Terraform (36%) and Ansible (31%). Chef and Puppet follow with 29% and 27% respectively.