The future is cloudy rather than bright for many businesses. Flexera’s 2025 State of the Cloud Report states that “cloud growth continues unabated,” with more than half of enterprise and small and midsize business (SMB) workloads running in public clouds.
The adoption of emerging technologies like generative AI (genAI), evolving cybersecurity threats and data privacy requirements, and the need to address increasingly costly and complex environments are all fueling changes in how organizations of various sizes utilize cloud solutions and services. Just as it’s vital to adjust your IT roadmap continually, it’s essential to periodically re-evaluate your cloud usage to ensure it aligns with your company’s shifting needs and goals.
If you’re fine-tuning your strategy, here are some notable cloud trends to watch and consider incorporating into your plan for the rest of 2025 and beyond. Please note that this isn’t an exhaustive list of trends to monitor.
1. Cloud migration is outpacing repatriation for overall growth.
While 21 percent of cloud workloads have undergone repatriation, that movement away from the cloud is outpaced by migration in the other direction and net-new cloud workloads, according to Flexera.
Shared from the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
2. Organizations of all sizes increasingly rely on managed service providers (MSPs) to manage public cloud solutions.
The majority (60 percent) of organizations surveyed for Flexera’s report said they rely on MSPs to some degree to manage public cloud solutions. As cloud environments become more complex, businesses increasingly turn to outside experts for assistance, freeing up resources internally to focus on core competencies.
Shared from the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
3. Cloud spending is climbing, and managing costs is the No. 1 cloud-related challenge.
In the next year, cloud spending is projected to increase by 28 percent, and organizations are over budget by 17 percent, according to Flexera. For the third consecutive year, the State of the Cloud Report found that managing cloud spend is the No. 1 cloud challenge (named by 84 percent of survey respondents). Subsequently, only 14 percent of the companies polled don’t have a FinOps team and aren’t planning to assemble one during the upcoming year.
Shared from the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
4. Private cloud investment is expected to increase.
As businesses seek to address sovereignty and security issues and contain costs, Forrester has predicted that private cloud investment will rise in 2025. Specifically, enterprises are expected to turn to private cloud for workloads necessitating on-premises hosting for privacy, security and compliance reasons. Learn about the pros and cons of private cloud here.
Additionally, Forrester states that businesses will explore alternatives to VMware following the acquisition by Broadcom. For guidance on post-acquisition strategy, please refer to our webinar recap and blog on how to navigate the Broadcom/VMware aftermath.
5. Industry cloud solutions are on the rise.
Cloud offerings tailored to meet the needs of organizations in specific verticals have become increasingly popular in recent years, according to Gartner. Businesses can streamline cloud adoption with these solutions crafted with industry-specific requirements in mind in terms of security, compliance, data and other concerns and necessities. Gartner predicts that over 70 percent of enterprises will utilize industry cloud platforms by 2027, up from under 15 percent in 2023.
Our trusted technology advisors are here to help if you want to adjust your company’s cloud strategy. We can rapidly identify cloud offerings and MSPs that align with your unique needs by leveraging our decades of IT experience, partnerships with leading cloud providers, the latest market data, and a decision-making tool that generates detailed comparison matrices. Why spend hours trying to make sense of chaotic and constantly shifting marketplaces when we’ve already done the homework for you?
Call 877-599-3999 or email sales@stratospherenetworks.com to connect with our advisors.
