According to a new report by Zesty, despite widespread adoption of cloud services and the critical role these resources play for businesses, 58% of respondents viewed the search for the best cloud offering to match their workload needs as the most difficult element of managing cloud costs. Similarly, 42% of CIOs and CTOs surveyed identified appropriate resource utilization as their top challenge. This difficulty has led to a 67% annual increase in the portion of the company’s technology budget allocated to cloud services, from 29% in 2021 to 47% in 2022. 

All respondents either have a finops strategy in place or have a plan to adopt finops. However, only 29% define their strategy as mature or evolving, 62% are still growing, and 9% haven’t yet begun.

According to 42% of respondents, the top cloud priority pre-pandemic was security investments, but with the financial hit that many organizations took due to COVID-19, this has since dropped to fourth place (18%) for the next 12 months. It has been replaced by revenue-related goals such as aligning speed of IT delivery with speed of business (25%), ensuring compliance needs are met (22%), and increasing direct revenues (20%).

Forty-two percent of CIOs and CTOs reported resource utilization as the top cloud challenge today. Over-provisioning combined with an inability to scale quickly often leads to significant cloud waste. 

Results are based on a survey of 100 CIOs and CTOs in the U.S. and the U.K. who are charged with managing multicloud or hybrid cloud environments for their organizations, which spanned between 250 and 1000 employees.

Read the full report by Zesty.