2025 State of the
Enterprises focus on FinOps to manage costs, while AI,
The Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report sheds light on cloud computing trends, the pressures facing IT professionals and the strategic initiatives they’re using to remain competitive in today’s dynamic and evolving landscape.
This year’s report shows that more enterprises are leveraging FinOps to manage costs as cloud growth continues unabated—despite some repatriation to on-premises. Artificial intelligence (AI), software licensing and sustainability in the cloud are all getting increased attention. At the same time, the battle for dominance between Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure is still neck and neck.
Report highlights
Here’s a sample of key findings from this year’s report based on a survey of 759 cloud decision-makers and users from around the world.
Public cloud services used by all organizations
N=759
Source: Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report 
This is the first year generative AI (GenAI) was included as an option for public cloud services used by all organizations, and it’s currently being used by 50% of respondents, which is the largest value ever recorded for a new service added to the list.
What public cloud providers does your organization use?
N=759
Source: Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report
AWS and Azure continue to vie for the top cloud provider spot, but Azure edges out AWS slightly in some tiers.
Utilization of MSPs for managing public cloud for all organizations
N=759
Source: Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report
Managed services provider (MSP) usage has increased year over year. In fact, 60% of all organizations use MSPs in some capacity for managing public cloud.
Does your company have a FinOps team to advise on, manage or execute cloud cost optimization strategies?
2024: N=753; 2025: N=759
Source: Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report
Respondents indicating that they have a FinOps team that does some/all of cloud cost optimization tasks increased from 51% to 59% this year.
Top cloud challenges for all respondents
N=759
Source: Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report
Managing cloud spend (84%) and security (77%) remain top of mind when it comes to cloud challenges.
Table of contents
Key findings
Use of the cloud continues to grow
Cloud adoption has now reached the tipping point, with over half of enterprise and SMB workloads currently running in public clouds. While analysts and experts are indicating that some organizations are moving cloud workloads back to their own data centers, we found that only 21% of cloud workloads have been repatriated. However, ongoing migration to the cloud and net-new cloud workloads outstrip these cloud exits, resulting in continued cloud growth.
Cost remains top of mind
With cloud spend expected to increase by 28% in the coming year, forecasting remains challenging, and organizations are exceeding budgets by 17%. FinOps is an operational framework and cultural practice which maximizes the business value of cloud, enables timely data-driven decision making and creates financial accountability through collaboration between engineering, finance and business teams. To counteract cost concerns, they’re expanding FinOps teams and focusing on cost optimization to recapture the 27% of cloud spend that continues to be wasted.
At the same time, organizations continue to mature their governance of cloud investments, and they’re looking for ways to optimize the cost of software licenses in the cloud. Some organizations are also turning to outside help, with over half of organizations using MSPs to manage at least some of their public cloud workload. Cloud sustainability initiatives are also becoming top of mind. In fact, over a third of organizations (36%) are already tracking their cloud carbon footprint, a figure that’s expected to increase within the next year.
Adoption of AI is exploding
Unsurprisingly, adoption of AI-related public cloud services is exploding. Seventy-nine percent of organizations are already using or experimenting with AI and machine learning (ML) PaaS services. There was also a surge in the use of data warehouse services, which are often used to feed AI models.
Seventy-two percent of organizations already use GenAI either extensively or sparingly, and another 26% are currently experimenting. Needless to say, GenAI is here to stay and on its way to becoming mainstream—at least in some capacity— in the near future.
Neck-and-neck competition between AWS and Azure for the top spot continues
With cloud use growing, AWS and Azure continue to run neck and neck among surveyed enterprises, but AWS maintains a lead among SMBs. In fact, 53% of SMBs are using AWS compared to 29% using Azure. Google Cloud Platform continues to hold the third spot this year, with nearly half (46%) of all organizations running some or significant workloads on it. The provider also continues to hold the top spot among organizations experimenting with public cloud.