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Flexera State of the Cloud 2022: Loadsamoney (to manage)

Flexera have released the latest edition of their annual “State of the Cloud” report and, as always, it gives some great insights into the growth, changes, and advances within the world of cloud – an area of growing importance for pretty much every IT asset manager around the world.

I’ve taken a quick look through the 95 page report (!) and pulled out some of the elements that are most relevant.

 

Microsoft rise through the ranks

Microsoft Azure has, for the first time, taken the top spot for adoption with 80% of respondents running some/significant workloads on Azure compared to 77% for Amazon AWS:

Flexera State of the cloud report 2022

53% of enterprises using Azure spend at least $1.2 million annually against 52% in AWS however, when looking at those spending over $12 million annually on cloud, Amazon AWS retains a slight lead over Microsoft Azure. It’s worth noting that 37% of enterprise respondents meet that latter threshold, with 11% of overall respondents spending over $60 million – there’s really significant spend happening which needs managing!

I’ve been saying for a couple of years that I expect Microsoft to, eventually, take the #1 IaaS cloud provider spot from Amazon. While Amazon still have the lion’s share of the market, the findings of this report coupled with the recent growth figures, suggest that Satya Nadella is working hard to prove me right…although my expectation of 2025 may be a little early. It’s a pretty significant shift which will potentially have repercussions for organisations when it comes to renewals and negotiations over the next few years – with all the cloud vendors.

 

Challenges

39% of enterprise organisations stated that understanding the implications of Bring Your Own Licensing (BYOL) is a challenge for cloud migrations with 76% stating that managing software licenses is an overall challenge. Despite this being a challenge for over ¾ of the respondents, it is only 5th in the rankings:

Flexera State of the cloud report 2022

ITAM can play a key role to help address the majority of these challenges – particularly managing spend, managing software licenses, and overall governance. Additionally, a strong relationship between ITAM & Security is critical to helping organisations discover and protect against the growing number of cyber security threats they face.

However, the percentage of organisations reporting that the SAM team has responsibility for managing software licenses being used in the cloud is still only 10% – with “Infrastructure and Ops teams” leading the way with 49%. When you put it all together, it does seem that organisations are making things more difficult for themselves:

  • 39% of enterprises struggle with BYOL in cloud migrations
  • 76% see managing BYOL as a challenge overall
  • 10% of them have the SAM/ITAM team in charge of managing BYOL

I may be biased but I’d say that there’s a solution readily available for many of those organisations…let the ITAM professionals do ITAM…regardless of whether it’s on-prem or in the cloud.

 

Conclusion

As always, the Flexera State of the Cloud report 2022 contains a wealth of information and this article has looked at only a small snapshot of the data but it helps illuminate the key trends:

  • Cloud is growing
  • Old challenges remain
  • New challenges appear
  • ITAM has a lot to offer

Use this information to help define and bolster your messaging around where ITAM fits into a strong, future-proofed, cloud governance strategy and talk to your leadership about the impacts. You can download the full report here.

PS: There’s plenty I haven’t touched on including multi-cloud, containers, managed services and more so keep an eye out for future content from me on these topics and more 😎

About Rich Gibbons

Rich has been in the world of IT and software licensing since 2003, having been a software sales manager for a VAR, a Microsoft licensing endorsed trainer, and now an ITAM analyst looking at software licensing and cloud.

A Northerner renowned for his shirts, Rich is a big Hip-Hop head, and loves travel, football in general (specifically MUFC), baseball, Marvel, and reading as many books as possible. Finding ways to combine all of these with ITAM & software licensing is always fun!

Connect with Rich on Twitter or LinkedIn.

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