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What the five-year spending comparison does—and does not—show
Flexera’s 2021 State of the Cloud Report found that 36% of surveyed enterprises spent more than $1 million per month on public cloud. In the 2026 report, 76% of large enterprises said they spent more than $5 million per month on cloud. These figures show that high monthly cloud spending is common among large enterprises in the newer survey, but they are not an apples-to-apples measure of growth: the respondent segments differ, as do the spending thresholds. They cannot be used to calculate a five-year spending growth rate. Flexera’s retrospective explains the distinction.
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The practical takeaway is not simply that companies are spending more. Cloud has become a substantial part of enterprise technology budgets, and organizations are under pressure to connect that spending to business outcomes. Flexera’s 2026 report describes a 12-percentage-point year-over-year increase in the metric “value delivered to business units,” suggesting that value measurement is gaining emphasis alongside cost control. The 2026 report covers that shift.
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Flexera’s estimate of wasted cloud spending changed only slightly over the five-year period: respondents estimated 30% in 2021 and 29% of IaaS and PaaS spending in 2026. This is respondents’ estimate, not an audit of actual bills or a universal measure of waste. The figures also refer to cloud spend broadly in 2021 and specifically to IaaS and PaaS in the 2026 report, so they should not be treated as perfectly identical measurements. Flexera’s five-year summary and 2026 report provide the context.
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The near-flat estimate, alongside continuing cost pressure, suggests that cloud optimization is not a one-time cleanup. As organizations add services, teams and workloads, they need ongoing visibility into what resources cost, who uses them and whether they deliver value.
Why cost management and formal governance are rising together
In Flexera’s 2026 survey, 85% of respondents named managing cloud costs as a top challenge, while 68% ranked optimization as a top priority. At the same time, 71% reported having a cloud center of excellence (CCOE), and 63% reported having a FinOps team. These are separate survey measures: they indicate that cost remains difficult even as more organizations establish structures to manage it. Flexera’s 2026 State of the Cloud Report and its report announcement list these findings.
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A CCOE typically coordinates cloud practices, standards and expertise across an organization; a FinOps team focuses on the financial management of cloud use, often bringing technical, finance and business stakeholders together. Neither label, on its own, proves that costs are controlled. Their value depends on whether teams can act on reliable usage and cost information and make trade-offs with the people responsible for workloads.
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Hybrid cloud is common, but it is not always a deliberate strategy
Seventy-three percent of organizations in Flexera’s 2026 survey reported hybrid cloud estates, three percentage points higher than the prior year. That makes hybrid environments a major operating reality for respondents. Flexera also cautions that using multiple cloud environments can result from mergers, legacy systems or siloed applications rather than a planned multi-cloud strategy. The distinction matters: a company can operate across environments without having chosen that complexity as an objective. The 2026 report discusses both the prevalence and the possible reasons.
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For organizations, the useful question is therefore not just how many cloud providers or environments they use. It is whether governance, cost visibility and operational responsibilities work across them—and whether the architecture serves a clear business need.
AI adds security, compliance and data-quality demands
Flexera’s 2026 survey release says 53% of respondents cited security and compliance as their leading challenge for cloud-based AI initiatives, while 40% cited data quality for AI training. These are reported challenges, not forecasts of AI’s effects or proof that every organization faces the same risks. They do show that AI cloud planning involves more than infrastructure capacity: organizations also need oversight of sensitive data, compliance obligations and the quality of training inputs. Flexera’s announcement reports these figures.
Flexera CTO Brian Shannon described the broader change as a move beyond treating cloud purely as a cost-cutting exercise, emphasizing growth and the need to bring FinOps, IT asset management and governance together. For technology leaders, that framing reflects the central tension in the survey: organizations want cloud and AI to enable new products and capabilities, while still needing clear controls over cost, risk and value.
What the next phase of FinOps may look like
Flexera reports that 49% of respondents used unit economics in 2026, up from 40% in 2025. Unit economics connects technology costs to a business measure—such as the cost to serve a customer or process a transaction—rather than treating a lower cloud bill as the only sign of success. The reported rise, alongside the increase in “value delivered to business units,” signals greater attention to explaining what cloud spending produces. The 2026 report presents both trends.
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That approach does not replace optimization. It gives organizations another way to judge it: reduce waste where possible, but also understand whether spending supports useful workloads and business outcomes. As hybrid environments and AI workloads expand, that balance is likely to matter more than a single headline measure of monthly spend.
How to read the findings
The 2026 State of the Cloud Report is based on a global survey of 753 cloud decision-makers and users conducted in winter 2025. Its percentages are rounded survey results. They describe respondents’ reported practices and perceptions, not audited cloud bills, causal effects or the behavior of every organization. The 2021 and 2026 monthly-spend figures are especially unsuitable as a direct trend line because their thresholds and respondent segments differ. Flexera’s report and retrospective provide the relevant qualifications.
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