Enterprises are ramping up hybrid cloud investments to accelerate the adoption of generative AI (GenAI) technologies, according to a survey by Wipro of 500 technology executives.
The report revealed more than half of respondents see AI as the key driver for cloud investments, with industries such as banking, manufacturing and retail leading the charge.
The survey highlighted that 54% of organizations plan to increase their hybrid cloud investments, while 56% will boost public cloud spending.
However, cloud adoption still outpaces AI adoption, with 55% of companies stating that their cloud strategy is more advanced than their AI efforts.
Just 35% report that they are progressing simultaneously with both technologies. Hybrid cloud solutions are proving to be the dominant model, with 60% of businesses utilizing a mix of on-premises and public cloud services to maintain flexibility.
As organizations scale their cloud operations, cost management is becoming a top priority, with 54% of respondents using tools like utilization analysis and automation to optimize spending.
A Cloud Management Approach
Interest in unified cloud cost strategies is also growing, particularly in the banking and financial services sectors, where 75% of firms have adopted a comprehensive cloud management approach.
Preetpal Singh, global head, product and platform engineering at Xebia, said several key factors will shape the evolution of unified cloud cost strategies in banking and financial services.
“As we see the increased adoption of hybrid cloud environments, which we know enhance flexibility and operational efficiency, it will become critical to optimize cloud spend,” he explained.
He said organizations would increasingly adopt centralized cost management tools to track cloud spend and predict future costs.
“However, this can be a challenge across hybrid environments with multiple cloud services and on-prem infrastructures,” he cautioned.
He added organizations will increasingly leverage AI and ML for things like automating cost monitoring and predicting usage to anticipate future costs.
“A challenge here, especially for BFSI, is regulatory compliance and balancing compliance with cost management,” Singh said.
He said to overcome some of these challenges, leaders will likely turn to cost management tools to track current and forecast future spending.
“The more complicated your data storage, the harder this becomes, especially for companies using a multi-hybrid-cloud approach,” he noted. “Data silos can also cause a roadblock as companies try to get a handle on their cloud costs.”
From his perspective, the first, and maybe most important, thing to do is to break down cross-departmental silos, as without full visibility, it is difficult to manage spend.
Overall, nearly six in 10 (59%) organizations surveyed said they now operate with a unified cloud strategy, indicating a more mature approach to cloud infrastructure as AI continues to shape enterprise IT investments.
From the perspective of Eamonn O’Neill, CTO at Lemongrass, the key link between cloud and AI is data.
“While enterprises have been working their way through their cloud infrastructure transformation programs, sorting out their data platform has been somewhat overtaken by the enthusiasm to try out GenAI,” he said.
He explained two big lessons arise from this first cycle of GenAI for enterprises — the first is organizations must sort out their data.
“The second is the use cases will be found deep within the enterprise and not by IT,” O’Neill said. “To me, the term transformation indicates changes to the operating model as well as changes to the technology.”
