It’s nearing the tip of the summer season 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 a whole lot of worldwide IT resolution makers assesses cloud methods, migration developments, and essential concerns for corporations shifting to the cloud or managing cloud environments. As a long-running report, it’s additionally a invaluable useful resource for understanding the evolution of cloud methods and priorities over time, with development knowledge that exhibits how methods and priorities have additionally developed 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 typical, it serves as a incredible useful resource for knowledge, analytics, and AI leaders as they take into account 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 prime 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 prime for the second yr in a row, with public cloud spend exceeding budgets by a median of 15%. The financial uncertainty that many corporations have confronted prior to now two years has exacerbated value overruns, and most knowledge groups ought to anticipate better 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 operating different workloads with predictable useful resource necessities on-premises. The opposite manner 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 person’s fingers in favor of ease of use. That trade-off shouldn’t be all the time mandatory or perfect.
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 crucial 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 probably the most crucial 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 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 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 could possibly function a wholesome sanity test for patrons who’re feeling stress emigrate. The fact is that, regardless of lots of cloud hype, lower than 20% of all corporations 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 take into account 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 accessible 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 straightforward to maneuver. It’s interoperable, so knowledge groups and knowledge customers can select the very best 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 knowledge is within the cloud or on-premises, it’s secure and accessible solely by the appropriate customers.
Strive Cloudera Right this moment
Cloudera is obtainable for AWS prospects to attempt right now. Deploy one in every of three use case patterns and get your fingers on the platform that may dramatically simplify and speed up your cloud journey.
