This article summarises key findings from Flexera’s 2020 State of the Cloud report, as reported by SDxCentral. The original report was published in April 2020.
Overview: Flexera’s 2020 State of the Cloud Report
Public cloud adoption continued to accelerate in 2020, with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) maintaining their positions as the market’s top three providers. That is one of the headline conclusions of Flexera’s 2020 State of the Cloud report, an annual benchmark that tracks how organisations are progressing in their cloud journeys.
The survey polled 750 cloud decision-makers and users from organisations ranging from 100 to more than 10,000 employees, spanning multiple industries and geographies. Respondents were asked whether they were actively running workloads, experimenting, planning to adopt, or had no plans to use each of the following platforms: AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, VMware Cloud on AWS, IBM Public Cloud, Oracle Infrastructure Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud.
Because most respondents use more than one cloud provider, individual adoption percentages sometimes sum to more than 100%. The report covers enterprise organisations (generally 1,000+ employees) and small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) separately, revealing notably different adoption patterns between the two segments.
Enterprise Adoption: Azure Closes the Gap on AWS
AWS retained its top position in the enterprise segment, with 76% of enterprise respondents reporting active use of the platform. However, the gap between AWS and Azure narrowed significantly: Azure climbed from 60% enterprise adoption in 2019 to 69% in 2020 — a nine-percentage-point jump in a single year.
Beyond current usage, the experimentation figures hint at where momentum may be building. Only 12% of enterprise respondents said they were experimenting with AWS — suggesting that most organisations that intend to adopt it already have. Azure, by contrast, had 18% of enterprise respondents still in the experimentation phase, indicating a larger pool of potential new customers that could convert to active users in the near term.
GCP Posts the Strongest Growth
While AWS and Azure dominated the headlines, Google Cloud Platform recorded the most dramatic growth trajectory among the top three providers. Enterprise adoption of GCP jumped from 20% in 2019 to 34% in 2020 — a 14-percentage-point increase. Both GCP and VMware Cloud on AWS also reported the highest proportions of respondents in the experimentation phase, which the report identifies as a leading indicator of future adoption growth.
SMB Adoption: AWS Dominates, But Azure and GCP Gain Ground
The SMB segment tells a somewhat different story. AWS holds a commanding lead with 74% current use among SMB respondents, followed by Azure at 46% and GCP at 37%. Providers such as VMware Cloud on AWS (10%), IBM Public Cloud (8%), and Oracle Infrastructure Cloud (6%) each captured 10% or less of the SMB market in terms of active use.
Looking at forward-looking intent — combining experimentation and planning figures — SMB respondents showed a slight preference for Azure (34%) over GCP (33%) for future projects in 2020. This is a shift from 2019, when SMBs showed the most forward-looking interest in GCP followed by AWS.
Adoption of VMware Cloud on AWS, IBM Public Cloud, Oracle Infrastructure Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud all rose year-over-year in the SMB segment, though each still accounts for a small share of the overall market.
COVID-19: An Unexpected Accelerant for Cloud Migration
The 2020 report was conducted as the COVID-19 pandemic began disrupting business operations globally. Flexera added a question mid-survey to capture pandemic-related sentiment from the final 25% of respondents — a real-time pulse check on how the crisis was reshaping cloud plans.
The results were stark: 59% of enterprise respondents said their cloud usage would exceed prior plans because of the pandemic. This finding aligned with a broader expectation among respondents that more than half of all enterprise workloads and data would move to public cloud within 12 months.
Organisations that had deferred digital transformation were suddenly under pressure to execute cloud migrations in days or weeks rather than months or years. The pandemic underscored cloud computing’s core value proposition — elastic, on-demand infrastructure that can scale to meet unpredictable spikes in demand — at a moment when that capability was urgently needed.
“No company’s IT organisation, no matter how large, will be able to match the efficiencies and agility of the cloud.”
Andres Rodriguez, CTO and co-founder, Nasuni
Key Takeaways for DevOps and Cloud Teams
- AWS remains the enterprise default, but its experimenter pool is shrinking — most organisations that plan to use it already do. Future organic growth may be slower than Azure’s.
- Azure’s enterprise momentum is real. A nine-point jump in a single year, combined with a larger experimentation cohort, suggests continued upward pressure on AWS’s lead.
- GCP is the fastest-growing of the top three. A 14-point jump in enterprise adoption and high experimentation rates make it a provider to watch, particularly for data and ML workloads.
- Multi-cloud is the norm. Because adoption percentages exceed 100% in aggregate, it is clear that most enterprises are not betting on a single provider. Cloud-agnostic tooling, cost management, and governance frameworks are increasingly essential.
- External shocks accelerate adoption. The pandemic demonstrated that cloud elasticity is not just an operational convenience but a business-continuity requirement. Teams that had invested in cloud-native architectures were better positioned to respond.
Watch: Cloud Adoption Trends
Source: Original reporting by SDxCentral based on Flexera’s 2020 State of the Cloud report.