Research
Cloud Computing Study 2024
Insight into cloud computing trends among technology decision-makers, including usage and plans across multiple cloud services, investments, business drivers and shifting services and applications to the cloud.
of IT decision-makers agree that their organization has accelerated its migration to the cloud over the past 12 months
agree that their organization is defaulting to cloud-based services when upgrading or purchasing new technical capabilities
agree that cloud capabilities helped their organization achieve increased and sustainable revenue this past year
Key findings
Cloud budgets are strong in 2024
Tech leaders are optimistic about their cloud investments for the next year as 65% expect an increase in their cloud budgets and 31% plan to keep them steady. This year, the average IT budget stands at $329 million, with enterprise companies spending $458 million and SMBs average $168 million. Of these budgets, about $95 million—or 29%—is allocated to cloud products and services. The reasons behind this cloud enthusiasm are varied: 34% of companies are focused on enhancing security and governance, 33% are aiming for better scalability, and 29% are eager to accelerate AI and machine learning adoption.
But what’s stalling cloud adoption?
Over the past year, 90% of organizations have faced challenges in their cloud adoption journey. The top obstacle has been budget and cost concerns, affecting 48% of companies. These issues range from managing and controlling cloud costs, worrying about long-term expenses, and dealing with budget constraints, to a lack of visibility into spending and difficulties managing multi-cloud environments. Despite these hurdles, 51% trust their FinOps programs to manage the costs of running Generative AI in the cloud, and 60% anticipate that their organization will establish dedicated roles to oversee cloud cost management in the coming year.
How cloud buyers are leveraging AI
Given the heightened focus on AI this year, it’s no surprise that cloud-based AI/machine learning capabilities have been identified as the top growth area by 30% of IT decision-makers in this year’s survey. This interest is even higher among enterprise organizations (34%). Organizations are leveraging AI in the cloud for various use cases, including data analytics (53%), Gen AI (52%), and machine learning (44%), with predictive analytics (41%) and Natural Language Processing (28%) also being prominent. It’s worth noting that only 60% of tech buyers are clear about their cloud provider’s roadmap for integrating AI tools into their platforms.
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