According to Hashicorp, only eight percent of companies are fully leveraging the business benefits of cloud investments with standardized shared services.

HashiCorp has announced the results of its 2024 State of Cloud Strategy Survey. While many companies are developing cloud programs and adopting infrastructure and security lifecycle management, most are not seeing business benefits. Only eight percent of surveyed companies have achieved a high level of maturity in their cloud programs. Two in five companies with a low level of maturity are still not seeing a return on their cloud investments.

Advanced enterprises reap benefits such as increased productivity, stronger security, and lower cloud costs. These organizations leverage platform teams and control their cloud environment through infrastructure and security lifecycle management.

Detailed results

• 67% of advanced organizations deliver standardized services through a platform team, ensuring better returns on cloud investments.
• 66% of respondents increased their cloud infrastructure spending in the past year, while 91% experienced some form of cloud waste.
• 64% of high maturity respondents have a shortage of skilled talent, but 67% rely on platform teams to maximize the impact of their teams.
• 70% of all respondents and 85% of advanced companies are using or planning to use AI for cloud infrastructure.
• 95% of respondents have started building a platform team, but only 42% currently rely entirely on these teams for standardized cloud operations.
• Highly mature companies are twice as likely to standardize on platform teams.
• 86% of advanced organizations experience increased security in the cloud.

Infrastructure lifecycle management

Advanced cloud organizations manage their critical applications with a holistic approach across the entire infrastructure management lifecycle with unified workflows to reduce risk and increase developer velocity.

These organizations manage the entire security lifecycle using an identity-driven approach to auditing, protecting, and linking secrets and credentials. Security is the most commonly cited factor for cloud infrastructure success because secret propagation is a challenge and comprehensive security lifecycle management is required.

The complete Hashicorp study with all the figures for the 1,200 IT professionals in companies with at least 1,000 employees can be found here.