Updated Stats on Cloud Sustainability, Repatriation and Cost Optimization

“The State of the Cloud Report” has been published for 13 straight years. I’ve read so many of these reports that I’ve seen private cloud usage surge several times amid the broader trend toward multicloud adoption. The latest edition by Flexera provides new data about sustainability initiatives and repatriation, as well as updates on the state of public cloud usage and cloud optimization.

Optimizing cloud costs outweighs sustainability goals, with 57% of survey respondents prioritizing cost savings while only 9% say sustainability and carbon reduction are more important. This outcome is not surprising because four-fifths of the 759 survey respondents indicated that cloud optimization is both a key goal and challenge.

Those who care about the environment should not lose hope, as 36% of respondents said their employer already has a defined sustainability initiative that includes carbon footprint tracking of cloud use. Another 21% plan to launch one within the next 12 months.

Organizations that already have a sustainability initiative are twice as likely as others to put sustainability on an equal footing as cost optimization.

FinOps ≠ Immediate Savings on Cloud Costs

No matter what the good folks at the FinOps Foundation say, FinOps is a term that doesn’t generate love. Yet, the practice of optimizing cloud spending isn’t going anywhere because cloud costs continually exceed their budgets. For this reason, FinOps continues to grow as 59% of the survey respondents have a FinOps team that advises on, manages or executes cloud optimization strategies. That’s up from 51% in the 2024 version of the study.

Despite the uptick in companies with FinOps teams, respondents estimated that 27% of their Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) spending is wasted, which is the same as it was in the 2024 study. In fact, a deeper dive into the data shows that those with no plans to create a FinOps team have lower levels of wasted cloud spending.

It appears that companies without the ability to track cloud costs are less worried about the topic because they are choosing to ignore it. Brian Adler, Flexera’s senior director of cloud market strategy, believes that FinOps teams have better visibility into actual cloud costs, which reveals waste that isn’t visible to those who don’t have the ability or desire to look.

Cloud will continue to grow as a percentage of all IT expenditures, but that doesn’t mean FinOps is here to stay. Its future depends on its ability to differentiate itself from other efforts to optimize technology spending.

Repatriation Is Not Stopping the Overall Trend Toward the Public Cloud

Respondents working at an enterprise (i.e., a company with >1,000 employees), claim that 21% of workloads and data in the public cloud have been repatriated. In other words, for every five workloads that have migrated to the public cloud, one has been repatriated. The study doesn’t say where they’re being repatriated to, but we assume they’re moving to on-premises locations that are still technically using private cloud infrastructure.

Overall, we continue to see a net inflow of workloads and data to the public cloud, with 52% of workloads running there, up from 49% when the study was conducted in 2024. As our own research predicted several years ago, it is traditional infrastructure (usually not virtualized), not modern on-premises data centers.

For those who are migrating workloads to public cloud, the top challenges are understanding app dependencies (56%) and assessing technical feasibility (49%). Assessing the cost-benefit of on-premises vs. cloud costs is less likely to be a challenge as compared to the 2024 study (48% in 2025, 42% in 2024). It also appears that selecting cost-efficient instances is less challenging than before. The chart below is an update on a version we created while analyzing last year’s report.