Report: 42% of CIOs say utilizing resources is the top challenge with cloud services

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 4th 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 It has been replaced by revenue-related goals such as aligning speed of IT delivery with speed of business (25%), ensuring compliance needs are met (22%), and increasing direct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 US and the UK who are charged with managing multicloud or hybrid cloud environments for their organizations, which spanned between 250-1000 employees.

Read the full report by Zesty.