Highlights –

  • According to a report, organizations spent over 32 percent of their cloud spend in wasted cloud spend, up from 30 percent the previous year.
  • Due to the increasing popularity of hybrid and multi-cloud platforms, private clouds will still play an important role in many organizations.

Microsoft Azure has taken a step ahead of AWS in the public cloud adoption stakes, as per a report from IT management outfit Flexera.

The 2022 State of the Cloud Report survey will have made the teams at Redmond and Amazon happy and brought less cheer to the crew of Oracle, which continued to remain in fourth place behind Google.

The statistics

On the Azure front, it is leading the way with maximum enterprise users –  80% of the respondents adopted Microsoft’s public cloud, up from 76% last year. This was just ahead of AWS, which claimed a score of 77% adoption rate, down from 79% last year. Google stands a step behind with 48%, followed by Oracle cloud infrastructure, which also tumbled to 27% from 32% a year ago.

The report states that Azure is way ahead of AWS in terms of adoption rate, though Google scored the highest (23%) for experimentation. Oracle had some cause for optimism with the highest (12%) planning to use its cloud. This means chances are ripe that it may do well in the subsequent years.

That Microsoft should start to overhaul Amazon in the enterprise cloud adoption is not entirely surprising, given the popularity of Microsoft 365, but what’s surprising is that it took so long.

Despite a slight drop in the adoption rate, from 72% to 69%, AWS still remains the leading SMB public cloud pack. On the other hand, Azure saw a jump from 48% to 59%.  Oracle also saw strong growth, nearly doubling its adoption rate from 15 percent to 28 percent year on year.

According to a report, “as organizations mature, they tend to gravitate toward market leaders” and Azure was outperforming AWS with light and moderate users and was closing in on the Amazon cloud for heavy usage.

According to a report, organizations spent over 32 percent of their cloud spend in wasted cloud spend, up from 30 percent the previous year. The figure might be higher “as many organizations tend to underestimate their amount of waste.”.

Expertise, security, and management were the biggest challenges reported by respondents and Microsoft’s Azure Stack topped the list for those taking a more private approach than public. This was followed by VMware vSphere.  Interestingly, for enterprises, OpenStack tumbled from 31% of respondents who “currently use” it last year to just 16% this time around.

Due to the increasing popularity of hybrid and multi-cloud platforms, private clouds will still play an important role in many organizations, especially those where security or sovereignty is an issue and executives want to keep data and processes close.

The report comes from a survey of 753 professionals worldwide, with most of them coming from the United States.