Cloud Migrations Pick up the Pace in 2024

The use of cloud to run workloads is on the rise this year, according to a new study of tech professionals and IT leaders.

Fifty-eight percent of the more than 750 people surveyed said they are planning to migrate more workloads to the cloud in 2024, up from 44% who said the same in the 2023 survey.

Organizations in the survey by Flexera, an IT management software company, appeared to be growing more sophisticated in the ways in which they use cloud resources. Among the findings:

Seventy-one percent are optimizing their use of their current cloud resources, up from 62% in 2023. Just over half of the respondents said they already have a FinOps team, while another 20% said they are planning to start one this year.

We don’t know how effective these FinOps teams are, but the report did claim that only 28% of cloud spending can be categorized as “wasted.”

Multicloud Gets More Sophisticated

The percentage of organizations that reported multicloud usage (89% in 2024) and hybrid cloud (73%) has barely changed over the last few years. However, the the sophistication of these cloud strategies is growing beyond just having more than one public and private cloud environment:

• Fifty-seven percent use applications siloed on different clouds, up from 44% who reported doing the same in the 2023 report.
• More organizations can failover between clouds in 2024, as compared to last year (49% versus 42%).
• Data integration between clouds has also increased, going from 37% in 2023 to 45% this year.
• Among organizations that have a hybrid-cloud first strategy, 59% use multiple public clouds and at least one private cloud. That’s up only slightly from 56% in 2023.

GenAI Use Spreading Fast

Use of public cloud generative AI services is widespread. Eighty-five percent of survey participants said their organization uses those services in some fashion, though the largest share of respondents, 39%, said they are still in the experimentation phase.

Cloud Migration Challenges

“Understanding app dependencies” is the top challenge for all organization sizes when migrating workloads to the public cloud.

Teams at enterprises are more likely among all organizations to consider “assessing on-premises versus cloud costs” to be a challenge.

Roughly the same percentage of enterprises, medium and small organizations cited “understanding application dependencies,”“assessing technical feasibility,” and “optimizing costs post-migration” to be problematic aspects of cloud migration