It’s nearing the top of the summer time in North America, and one report has been a staple on my studying record for greater than a decade: the Flexera State of the Cloud Report. The annual survey of tons of of world IT resolution makers assesses cloud methods, migration tendencies, and necessary concerns for corporations transferring to the cloud or managing cloud environments. As a long-running report, it’s additionally a precious useful resource for understanding the evolution of cloud methods and priorities over time, with development information that exhibits how methods and priorities have additionally developed over time. I’ve referenced the newest iteration of the report dozens of instances since its inception.
The 2024 version of the Flexera State of the Cloud report was launched in March and, as ordinary, it serves as a unbelievable useful resource for information, analytics, and AI leaders as they take into account the infrastructure and platform choices for his or her structure. Listed below are a number of key takeaways from the report:
Managing Cloud Spend Stays a high Problem – Even Overtaking Safety
One of many largest surprises of the 2023 report was that managing cloud spend overtook safety as the highest problem for organizations for the primary time in 11 years. Cloud spend remained on high for the second 12 months in a row, with public cloud spend exceeding budgets by a mean of 15%. The financial uncertainty that many corporations have confronted prior to now two years has exacerbated price overruns, and most information groups ought to count on higher scrutiny over their public cloud consumption.
There are two methods to fight the excessive prices of public clouds. The primary is to architect for hybrid deployments. The cloud is good for workloads with intermittent or burst capability necessities, like coaching AI fashions. However corporations can get monetary savings by working different workloads with predictable useful resource necessities on-premises. The opposite method is to be strategic about the place and when to leverage SaaS platforms, which take management over workload tuning and useful resource allocation out of the consumer’s fingers in favor of ease of use. That trade-off is just not at all times obligatory or superb.
Elevated Adoption of Multi-Cloud Methods
Multi-cloud methods proceed to dominate. 89% of respondents report utilizing a number of clouds, up from 87% in 2023. The dominance of multi-cloud is the results of the elevated parity in performance and ecosystems between the hyperscalers, in addition to the will to keep away from lock-in with any particular person cloud supplier.
Information groups working in multi-cloud environments should make some vital architectural choices. The primary is to leverage open codecs, together with Apache Parquet on the file stage and Apache Iceberg on the desk stage, to make sure that information is each transferable between clouds and interoperable with a variety of instruments for various use circumstances. The second and maybe essentially the most vital part of multi-cloud architectures is unified safety and governance throughout the complete information property, so delicate information is at all times protected and information shoppers have entry to a constant and correct view of the information wherever it lives.
A Lot of Information Will Stay On-Premises
Many organizations nonetheless favor to maintain delicate information on-premises, together with client information, company monetary information mental property, analysis information, and extra, whereas nearly all of non-sensitive information is destined for the general public cloud. This result’s intuitive for anybody who has hung out speaking to prospects in extremely regulated industries like banking and healthcare, however it may function a wholesome sanity test for patrons who’re feeling stress emigrate. The fact is that, regardless of a whole lot of cloud hype, lower than 20% of all corporations who participated within the survey plan to maneuver their delicate information to the cloud.
Cloudera Prospects Have an Benefit
The excellent news for Cloudera prospects, as they take into account their cloud technique, is that it doesn’t actually matter whether or not they plan emigrate delicate information to a public cloud or go away it on-premises. As the one true hybrid platform for information, analytics, and AI, Cloudera allows prospects to freely select any infrastructure for his or her information analytics workloads, and that information stays in open codecs and accessible for a variety of workloads, from information engineering to Enterprise Intelligence to AI and ML. It’s moveable, that means that if infrastructure necessities change, it’s simple to maneuver. It’s interoperable, so information groups and information shoppers can select the most effective software or execution engine on a workload-by-workload foundation. And it’s protected by a unified governance and safety resolution, so prospects can relaxation assured that whether or not their information is within the cloud or on-premises, it’s protected and accessible solely by the proper customers.
Attempt Cloudera Immediately
Cloudera is out there for AWS prospects to strive right this moment. Deploy certainly one of three use case patterns and get your fingers on the platform that may dramatically simplify and speed up your cloud journey.