Five years of Flexera’s cloud survey data point to a clear shift: enterprise cloud use and spending have scaled, but cost pressure has not gone away. Companies are responding with more formal governance and FinOps practices, while hybrid environments and AI workloads add new demands. These findings describe survey respondents—not a census of cloud use or an audit of actual bills.
What the five-year comparison does—and does not—show
Flexera’s retrospective reports that 36% of enterprises in its 2021 survey spent more than $1 million per month on public cloud. In its 2026 survey, 76% of large enterprises reported spending more than $5 million per month on cloud. Those figures indicate that high monthly spending is now common among the large enterprises represented in the newer survey, but they are not a valid growth-rate comparison: the respondent segments and spending thresholds differ. Flexera summarizes the comparison in its five-year retrospective.
The 2026 report is based on a global survey of 753 cloud decision-makers and users conducted in winter 2025. Its percentages are rounded and reflect what respondents reported about their organizations. They should not be read as audited cloud bills, measurements of every company, or proof that one trend caused another.
Is cloud waste actually going down?
Flexera’s estimate of wasted cloud spend changed only slightly: respondents estimated 30% in 2021, while the 2026 report puts estimated waste for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) at 29%. This is a small decline over five years, not evidence that waste has been eliminated. It is also an estimate reported through Flexera’s surveys, not a universal or independently audited measure.
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The persistence of that estimate alongside higher reported spending helps explain why optimization remains a priority. As cloud estates grow, organizations have more room to improve utilization and allocation, but also more services and workloads to track.
Why cost pressure and formal governance coexist
In Flexera’s 2026 survey, 85% of respondents named managing cloud costs as a top challenge, and 68% ranked optimization as a top priority. At the same time, 71% reported having a cloud center of excellence (CCOE), while 63% reported a FinOps team. The figures suggest that formal structures are becoming common without making cloud cost management an easy or solved problem.
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Flexera’s earlier figures offer context: 61% of organizations planned to optimize cloud costs in its 2021 survey. Because the measures and survey years differ, this is best treated as a snapshot of continuing attention to optimization, not a directly comparable measure of program effectiveness.
Hybrid cloud is the prevailing reported environment
Seventy-three percent of organizations in the 2026 survey said they operate hybrid cloud estates, a three-percentage-point increase from the prior year. That makes coordination across cloud and other environments a central operational concern for many respondents. Flexera cautions that multi-cloud use can arise from mergers or siloed applications as well as deliberate architecture choices; the presence of multiple environments does not, by itself, show that an organization planned a coherent multi-cloud strategy.
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For IT teams, the practical implication is that cost visibility and governance have to work across the estate a company actually has. Different environments can complicate consistent oversight, even when the number of cloud providers is not itself a strategic goal.
AI adds oversight and data-quality concerns
Flexera’s 2026 release says 53% of respondents identified security and compliance as their leading challenge for cloud-based AI initiatives, while 40% cited data quality for AI training. These are survey-reported challenges, not predictions about how every AI project will perform. They show that organizations are weighing governance and data readiness alongside the infrastructure needs of AI workloads.
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As Flexera CTO Brian Shannon put it, “Cloud is maturing and visibility across technology is increasing,” and he described the next phase as bringing “FinOps, IT asset management and governance together.” His remarks frame the company’s interpretation of the findings; the percentages above remain respondents’ reported views and practices.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What comes next: measuring value as well as savings
Flexera reports a 12-percentage-point year-over-year increase in the metric it calls “value delivered to business units.” It also says 49% of respondents used unit economics in 2026, compared with 40% in 2025. Unit economics connects technology spending to a business output—such as the cost of serving a customer or processing a transaction—rather than treating a lower total bill as the only measure of success.
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Together, those findings point to a broader cloud-management question: not only whether a company can reduce avoidable spending, but whether the cloud resources it pays for support useful business outcomes. The survey establishes greater reported use of unit economics and a rise in reported business-unit value; it does not establish that any specific governance model or cloud strategy caused those changes.
How to read the findings for your organization
- Separate scale from efficiency. Rising spending can reflect larger workloads and broader adoption; it does not by itself show whether a company is using cloud efficiently.
- Track estimates as estimates. A reported waste percentage can help identify a management concern, but it is not a substitute for reviewing your own billing and utilization data.
- Design governance for the real estate. Hybrid environments and organizational silos can require shared visibility across teams and platforms, whether or not multi-cloud was an intentional strategy.
- Connect costs to outcomes. Cost optimization is more informative when paired with business measures that show what the spending enables.
- Include AI readiness in oversight. Security, compliance, and training-data quality are prominent concerns in respondents’ cloud AI initiatives.
Flexera’s 2026 State of the Cloud Report and its report announcement provide the underlying survey context and additional findings. The evidence supports a picture of cloud as an increasingly important business foundation that still requires disciplined cost management, governance, and measurement—not a simple forecast that any one provider or architecture will dominate.
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