Cloud maturity drives operational efficiency

94% are still wasting money in the cloud

Even as many companies boost their cloud investments and hope to save money with multi-cloud, almost all respondents (94%) report avoidable cloud spend for a variety of reasons. That number is virtually unchanged from the 2022 State of Cloud Strategy Survey results.

Low cloud-maturity firms, in particular, struggle with over-provisioning resources (53%) and idle or underused resources (55%) compared to 50% overall for those issues. The third most common factor, lack of needed skills, cited as a factor in cloud waste by 43% of respondents, was evenly distributed across all levels of maturity.

Significantly, high-maturity organizations were much more likely to report multi-cloud has or is about to help them achieve their business goals (94%) compared to low-maturity organizations (only 60% of which said they were already enjoying these benefits, while another 22% expect to do so in the next year).

Reliability, cost, and security & governance drive multi-cloud adoption

But what exactly are the problems that organizations are seeking to address with multi-cloud? The most commonly cited multi-cloud drivers are reliability (51%), cost reduction (48%), security and governance (45%), digital transformation (45%), and scalability (45%). Notably, in times of macroeconomic disruption, cost reduction charted much higher this year than last year. Only 10% had no choice but to go multi-cloud due to acquisitions or other issues, but that's still double last year's percentage.

Diving more deeply, high-maturity organizations reported better results across many multi-cloud benefits, most notably cost savings. More than half (53%) of high-maturity respondents used multi-cloud to cut costs, compared to just 42% of low-maturity respondents. Similarly, reliability was named a multi-cloud driver by 59% of high-maturity companies vs. 49% of low-maturity companies. But the biggest difference between high and low maturity organizations was for portability of data and applications, which was a driver for almost half (49%) of high-maturity companies but less than a third (29%) of low-maturity firms.

Globally, the Asia-Pacific region (56%) found cost savings in multi-cloud even more compelling, while Europe-Middle East-Africa (42%) was less focused on this.

Multi-cloud success relies on security, availability, and scaling

Now that we know what’s driving multi-cloud adoption, what factors determine its success? Notably, all of the choices presented scored highly, being called important or very important by almost three-quarters of respondents.

Security (88%), availability (84%), and scalability (84%) were the most often named important/very important multi-cloud success factors, followed by regulatory/compliance requirements (82%), staffing and skill levels (82%), budget (80%), visibility into cloud infrastructure (78%), automated tooling (77%), and platform teams (75%).

Security (60%) and availability (48%) also top the list when looking only at what respondents considered very important, while regulatory/compliance requirements (46%) edge out infrastructure scaling (45%) and budget (45%) from that perspective.

Location also matters: Budget was a very important factor for 51% of Asia-Pacific respondents vs. just 41% for respondents in Europe-Middle East-Africa and North America (and 45% overall).

Multi-cloud benefits include security, visibility, tooling, and more

Put it all together, and a multi-cloud strategy delivers a wide variety of benefits, ranging from promoting a stronger security posture (74%) to helping attract, motivate, and retain skilled staffers (68%, and more on that later). Those two factors appear related: while multi-cloud clearly creates security challenges, working in multiple cloud environments can help organizations keep their security professionals engaged, and also be a forcing function toward more intentional oversight of their security operations. The big news, though, is that all 11 of the possible choices were selected by more than two-thirds of respondents, suggesting that multi-cloud benefits are broad, and broadly distributed.

Mature organizations realize more multi-cloud benefits

Despite the clustering of the overall results, however, there were big differences between high- and low-maturity organizations. Large differences showed up in the areas of compliance and risk (80% to 56%), infrastructure visibility/insight (82% to 59%), and speed (76% to 59%). But the biggest difference between high- and low-maturity organizations surfaced in their ability to attract, motivate, and retain talent (74% to 48%, and again, more on that below).

Continuing this thread, a lack of necessary staff/skills was the second-most commonly cited internal security threat, just behind data privacy protection. Notably, that's up from a fifth-place ranking in last year's survey. Similarly, organizations that don’t use platform teams — a key component of multi-cloud maturity — were even more likely to cite skills issues as an internal threat, 56% compared to 43% for organizations that do use platform teams. (More on these issues below.)

Highly mature organizations rank skills as a top driver of multi-cloud success

But that's not the only way to look at the issue. As shown in the previous section, staffing/skill level was an important/very important driver of multi-cloud success for 80% of respondents, with 38% rating it very important. And more than half (51%) of highly mature organizations rated staffing/skill level very important, compared to less than a third (31%) of low-maturity respondents.

And while largely focused on other benefits, 68% of multi-cloud users said their strategy helps them attract, motivate, and retain talent. Importantly, almost three-quarters (74%) of highly mature organizations gained staffing benefits from multi-cloud, compared to less than half (48%) of low-maturity organizations.

Given the prevalence of the issue, organizations are addressing skills shortages with multiple tactics, most often via a common operating model/shared automated workflows (58%), followed by reskilling/upskilling (56%). Working with partners was a plan for 43% of respondents, while only 36% planned to boost budgets — though it's not clear whether that's because they thought the tactic wouldn't work or it wasn't economically feasible.

Ironically, while platform teams are often seen as a force multiplier that can help mitigate shortages of skilled technical talent, the biggest reason for organizations not to field platform teams is a lack of skilled staffers (more on that issue in the platform teams section below).

Secrets leakage is now the most common security threat

At the same time, password/credentials/secrets leakage is now seen as the most common security threat (cited by 50% of respondents), topping highly publicized, long-standing concerns like data theft (49%), phishing (46%), and ransomware (42%).

But once again, there's a big difference in how high- and low-maturity organizations view the passwords/secrets issue. Only 47% of high maturity organizations listed credentials leakage as one of their biggest threats, compared to 61% of low-maturity organizations. Perhaps modern zero trust security practices employed in highly mature organizations help them feel more comfortable with their security posture, especially regarding secrets issues. Mature organizations also report more confidence when it comes to ransomware, with only 39% naming it as one of the biggest cloud security threats, compared to 47% of low-maturity organizations.

Internally, the most commonly cited security threats are data/privacy protection (45%) followed closely by lack of skills (44%) and threat detection and remediation (43%). And once again, low-maturity firms were more likely to cite skills issues as an internal security threat, 52% compared to 42% for high-maturity organizations. As noted above, organizations that don’t use platform teams were even more likely to cite skills issues as an internal threat, 56% compared to 43% for organizations that do use platform teams.

92% is a big number, but only 39% are scaling the use of platform teams throughout the organization. Looking at these results through the cloud maturity lens is even more revealing. More than one in five (22%) of low-maturity organizations said they either didn't know or didn't use a platform team at all, and only 14% are scaling their use. On the other hand, a full 100% of high-maturity organizations use platform teams and 69% are scaling them.

Given the continuing growth of platform teams, what's keeping the laggards from joining the party? The most common reason is a lack of skills and staff, named by more than a third of respondents without a platform team. For comparison, only 22% of non–platform team users mentioned this factor in the 2022 survey, when it was the sixth most common reason. The relationship between platform teams and skills shortages is complex. While platform teams can leverage scarce skills, they do require a certain amount of skilled staff to function properly.

As for other factors, almost a third of respondents (31%) who don't have a platform team are still exploring the need one. Only 11% say they don't see the need for a platform team.

Platform teams help reduce operational complexity

Of course, having a platform team doesn't tell you much about what that team is actually doing. As shown in the chart below, platform teams often do pretty much all the things. When you combine the adoption, standardization, and scaling stages, responsibility for each practice approaches or exceeds 90% — collectively pointing towards the goal of reducing operational complexity through standardization.

The importance of automation tools becomes even clearer when you look at the difference between high- and low-maturity organizations. 59% of highly mature organizations say automation tools are extremely important, compared to just 41% of less mature organizations — that's almost half again as many.

Companies with a more mature cloud strategy better understand their workflows so they can be more confident automating them. This amplifies the business value they can extract from faster and easier configuration and security updates — meaning they get even more from their automation as they scale. The chart below notes the most commonly cited automation benefits, including security, efficiency, flexibility, and speed. Notably, a significantly higher percentage of high-maturity organizations report gaining these benefits almost across the board.

Respondents were awarded points based on their level of implementation of certain practices within these categories.

1. We do not use this practice at all (0 points)
2. We are adopting this practice (1 point)
3. We are standardizing this practice (2 points)
4. We are scaling this practice (3 points)

Answers to the multipart questions were weighted to give equal value to each of the five dimensions, and each respondent's total score was used to calculate their level of maturity:

1. The bottom 25% were considered low maturity, experimenting with these practices
2. The middle 50% were considered medium maturity, standardizing these practices
3. The top 25% were considered high maturity, scaling these practices