Though cloud cost control emerged as an enterprise priority this year, most cloud customers did not associate lower price-per-unit or purchasing convenience with their primary provider. 

Instead, Forrester research finds, companies valued public cloud providers for the security and compliance, reliability and technical capabilities they afforded. The analyst firm aggregated several surveys of between 600 and 2,000 enterprise cloud decision-makers conducted throughout the year. 

Some organizations preferred cloud’s usage-based operational expenditure model over the capital expenditures on-prem infrastructure requires, Forrester found.

Cloud is sticky. Once an organization migrates vital data and workloads to a particular vendor’s infrastructure, backtracking can mean dealing with egress fees, workforce retraining and application restructuring.

“People aren't generally shutting down operations on one cloud and moving to another,” Forrester Principal Analyst Lee Sustar said.

While most companies are happy with their current cloud provider, nearly two-thirds of respondents expect to adopt multicloud strategies as spending on the technology increases. 

Nearly 9 in 10 respondents said their company was either satisfied with its current cloud plan or evaluating alternate services from the same provider rather than looking to move current workloads to a competing vendor.

Multicloud maturation

Rather than second-guessing prior cloud decisions, large companies and their procurement teams are shopping around for specific features and capabilities, weighing options for the next round of migrations.

McDonald’s leveraged AWS data and machine learning to upgrade its drive-thru capabilities two years ago and partnered with Google Cloud this week to bring edge computing analytics into thousands of its restaurants, citing customer and staff experience enhancements.

“Organizations no longer define themselves as an AWS shop or an Azure shop or Google shop,” Sustar told CIO Dive. “They say, ‘we are the cloud team for this organization and the various cloud providers are suppliers to us that we may change over time — or we may add new ones.’”

Honda America turned to Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service for its cloud-based generative AI needs earlier this year after leaning on AWS to optimize its content delivery network globally last year.

“Microsoft has made it attractive to move [on-prem] Microsoft workloads into Azure for many reasons, and the customer gets some capabilities that they otherwise might not have by going into Azure,” Sustar said. “But that same customer may have AWS as their primary cloud. So they've become multicloud, whether they intended to or not.”

Cost may not even be a top priority, Sustar said.

“You don’t go into cloud to save money,” said Sustar. “You go into cloud for speed, scale and agility.”

Three-quarters of respondents said their organization increased investment in public cloud this year, but there was no consensus around the impetus among IT decision-makers.

Outsourcing server and storage ownership, strengthening regulatory compliance, shoring up disaster recovery, improving security and enhancing software development processes were cited by roughly one-quarter of respondents as motivation for further adoption.

“It's very difficult for most organizations to have the kind of resilience, performance and technical capabilities that a big public cloud can offer — those are all characteristics of the major cloud providers,” Sustar said.