It’s nearing the top of the summer time in North America, and one report has been a staple on my studying checklist for greater than a decade: the Flexera State of the Cloud Report. The annual survey of a whole lot of world IT determination makers assesses cloud methods, migration developments, and vital issues for firms transferring to the cloud or managing cloud environments. As a long-running report, it’s additionally a worthwhile useful resource for understanding the evolution of cloud methods and priorities over time, with development information that reveals how methods and priorities have additionally advanced over time. I’ve referenced the most recent 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 implausible 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 firms have confronted previously 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 firms can lower your expenses by operating different workloads with predictable useful resource necessities on-premises. The opposite means 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 just isn’t at all times crucial or excellent.
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 need to keep away from lock-in with any particular person cloud supplier.
Knowledge 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 degree and Apache Iceberg on the desk degree, 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 probably the most vital element of multi-cloud architectures is unified safety and governance throughout all the information property, so delicate information is at all times protected and information customers have entry to a constant and correct view of the info wherever it lives.
A Lot of Knowledge Will Stay On-Premises
Many organizations nonetheless desire to maintain delicate information on-premises, together with client information, company monetary information mental property, analysis information, and extra, whereas the vast majority of non-sensitive information is destined for the general public cloud. This result’s intuitive for anybody who has frolicked speaking to prospects in extremely regulated industries like banking and healthcare, however it might function a wholesome sanity examine for purchasers who’re feeling strain emigrate. The truth is that, regardless of numerous cloud hype, lower than 20% of all firms who participated within the survey plan to maneuver their delicate information to the cloud.
Cloudera Clients 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 depart it on-premises. As the one true hybrid platform for information, analytics, and AI, Cloudera permits 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 transportable, which means that if infrastructure necessities change, it’s straightforward to maneuver. It’s interoperable, so information groups and information customers can select the most effective device or execution engine on a workload-by-workload foundation. And it’s protected by a unified governance and safety answer, so prospects can relaxation assured that whether or not their information is within the cloud or on-premises, it’s secure and accessible solely by the best customers.
Attempt Cloudera At present
Cloudera is offered for AWS prospects to attempt as we speak. Deploy one among three use case patterns and get your fingers on the platform that may dramatically simplify and speed up your cloud journey.