It’s nearing the top of the summer time in North America, and one report has been a staple on my studying listing for greater than a decade: the Flexera State of the Cloud Report. The annual survey of lots of of worldwide IT determination makers assesses cloud methods, migration tendencies, and essential concerns for firms transferring to the cloud or managing cloud environments. As a long-running report, it’s additionally a useful useful resource for understanding the evolution of cloud methods and priorities over time, with pattern knowledge that reveals how methods and priorities have additionally advanced over time. I’ve referenced the newest iteration of the report dozens of occasions since its inception.
The 2024 version of the Flexera State of the Cloud report was launched in March and, as traditional, it serves as a unbelievable useful resource for knowledge, analytics, and AI leaders as they think about the infrastructure and platform choices for his or her structure. Listed here are a couple of key takeaways from the report:
Managing Cloud Spend Stays a high Problem – Even Overtaking Safety
One of many greatest 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 median of 15%. The financial uncertainty that many firms have confronted up to now two years has exacerbated value overruns, and most knowledge groups ought to anticipate 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 get monetary savings 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 all the time needed 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 will 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 knowledge 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 your entire knowledge property, so delicate knowledge is all the time protected and knowledge shoppers have entry to a constant and correct view of the information wherever it lives.
A Lot of Knowledge Will Stay On-Premises
Many organizations nonetheless favor to maintain delicate knowledge on-premises, together with shopper knowledge, company monetary knowledge mental property, analysis knowledge, and extra, whereas the vast majority of non-sensitive knowledge 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 will probably function a wholesome sanity examine for purchasers who’re feeling stress emigrate. The truth is that, regardless of a number of cloud hype, lower than 20% of all firms who participated within the survey plan to maneuver their delicate knowledge to the cloud.
Cloudera Clients Have an Benefit
The excellent news for Cloudera prospects, as they think about their cloud technique, is that it doesn’t actually matter whether or not they plan emigrate delicate knowledge to a public cloud or go away it on-premises. As the one true hybrid platform for knowledge, analytics, and AI, Cloudera permits prospects to freely select any infrastructure for his or her knowledge analytics workloads, and that knowledge stays in open codecs and obtainable for a variety of workloads, from knowledge engineering to Enterprise Intelligence to AI and ML. It’s moveable, which means that if infrastructure necessities change, it’s simple to maneuver. It’s interoperable, so knowledge groups and knowledge shoppers can select one of the best instrument 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 knowledge is within the cloud or on-premises, it’s secure and accessible solely by the best customers.
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