Flexera, the company that helps organizations realize technology's power to accelerate their business, today announces the findings of the RightScale 2019 State of the Cloud Report. In its eighth year, the RightScale 2019 State of the Cloud Report from Flexera is the leading survey of corporate cloud users, including 786 technology professionals at large and small enterprises across a multitude of industries, such as tech services, software, financial services, telecom, education, government and healthcare.

The survey results are available in the RightScale 2019 State of the Cloud Report from Flexera, which can be downloaded at https://www.flexera.com/2019-cloud-report.

"The data from the RightScale 2019 State of the Cloud Report by Flexera is consistent with what we're hearing from our C-level customers: managing the rapid increase in cloud use requires new capabilities for cost optimization and IT governance," said Jim Ryan, CEO of Flexera. "With multi-cloud as the strategy of choice, most enterprises are already spending over $1 million a year in public cloud. As a result, optimizing costs is the top cloud priority for the third year in a row, and governance is the top challenge. This is exactly why we expanded the Flexera solution through the acquisition of RightScale and Meta SaaS last year - to help IT teams optimize spend across on-premises, cloud and SaaS, and reallocate wasted spend to support critical IT initiatives. These types of strategic solutions allow companies to be smart about how they're utilizing the cloud, and ultimately help leaders realize how powerful technology can be in accelerating their businesses."

A few key highlights from the RightScale 2019 State of the Cloud Report from Flexera:

• The #1 priority in 2019 is cloud cost optimization: Optimizing existing cloud use for cost savings is the top initiative in 2019 for the third year in a row, increasing to 64 percent from 58 percent in 2018
• Enterprise cloud spend is significant and growing quickly: Enterprises plan to spend 24 percent more on public cloud in 2019 vs. 2018. Eight percent of enterprises spend more than $12 million a year on public cloud, while 50 percent spend more than $1.2 million annually
• Cloud users are not doing all they can to optimize costs: Cloud users underestimate the amount of wasted cloud spend. Respondents estimate 27 percent waste in 2019, while Flexera has measured actual waste at 35 percent
• Managing cloud spend and cloud governance are the top challenges for enterprises: Cloud cost management and cloud governance are top challenges for all levels of cloud users. Among enterprises, optimizing cloud costs (84 percent in 2019 vs. 80 percent in 2018) and cloud governance (84 percent in 2019 vs. 77 percent in 2018) are growing challenges
• Enterprises create cloud "centers of excellence" to focus on cloud governance: 66 percent of enterprises already have a central cloud team or center of excellence, with another 21 percent planning one (up from 57 percent and 24 percent the previous year)
• Managing software licenses in the public cloud is top of mind: Understanding the cost implications of licensed software running in the cloud is also a key challenge (52 percent). Other challenges include understanding the complexity of license rules in public cloud (42 percent), and ensuring that they are following the rules (41 percent)
• Hybrid cloud strategies continue to grow: Enterprises with a hybrid strategy (combining public and private clouds) grew to 58 percent in 2019 from 51 percent in 2018
• Organizations leverage almost 5 clouds on average: Respondents are already running applications in a combination of 3.4 public and private clouds, and experimenting with 1.5 more for a total of 4.9 clouds
• Companies run a majority of workloads in cloud: Respondents overall run 38 percent of workloads in public cloud and 41 percent in private cloud (which may include cloud-enabled virtual environments)
• Use of PaaS services from public cloud providers is exploding: Serverless is the top-growing extended cloud service for the second year in a row, with a 50 percent growth over 2018 (24 to 36 percent adoption). Stream processing is tied for first, increasing from 20 to 30 percent adoption. Machine learning, container-as-a-service, and IoT are the next fastest growing
• Container use is up, and Kubernetes use is skyrocketing: The use of Docker containers continues to grow, with adoption increasing to 57 percent from 49 percent in 2018. Kubernetes, a container orchestration tool that leverages Docker, achieves the fastest growth, increasing from 27 percent to 48 percent adoption
• Ansible takes the top spot among configuration tools: Among all respondents, Ansible has 41 percent adoption, followed by Chef and Puppet at 37 percent adoption

In 2018, Flexera acquired RightScale, a top multi-cloud management provider, as well as Meta SaaS, which focuses on SaaS spend management capabilities. These acquisitions position Flexera as the top technology asset management offering across software, hardware, SaaS and cloud services, helping companies solve the critical problem of cloud services overspend and control.

For more information on the RightScale 2019 State of the Cloud Report from Flexera, download the report here: https://www.flexera.com/2019-cloud-report