U.S. Leads Global Cloud Adoption, Fueled by AI and FinOps Expansion

The cloud is a global phenomenon, but adoption rates are highest in the United States.

A new Forrester Research report reveals that the United States continues to dominate global cloud adoption and implementation, with artificial intelligence emerging as a primary driver of expansion despite ongoing economic uncertainty. The report highlights how enterprises are updating their cloud strategies by incorporating AI and FinOps while strengthening their security and resilience objectives.

Key findings of the Forrester report include the following:

The U.S. Sees Cloud Innovations First

Major cloud providers are actively expanding their U.S. presence. Microsoft is adding regions to its West U.S. cloud region in California and establishing a new region in Georgia. Google has opened regions in Ohio and Dallas, while AWS has deployed 34 Local Zones globally, with 17 located in the U.S.

There are many reasons why the United States leads the world in cloud adoption. One of them is the fact that U.S. users see new cloud offerings up to six months earlier than other regions, according to Forrester.

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"The U.S. cloud providers roll out services in the U.S. first because that's where most of their customers are and where their infrastructure is most developed — for example, the cluster of hyperscaler data centers in Northern Virginia near Washington," Forrester analyst Lee Sustar, told ITPro Today.

Source: Alamy

FinOps Takes Center Stage

With senior cloud decision-makers reporting average spending of $29 million on public cloud in the past year, financial optimization has become paramount.

In recent years the process of financial optimization for cloud operations has become commonly known as FinOps. The report highlights that 69% of U.S. enterprise cloud decision-makers have implemented FinOps practices, with an additional 13% planning to adopt them within the next year.

Among the leading advocates of FinOps is the FinOps Foundation, which Sustar sees as being a positive force for cloud users in the United States.

"The FinOps Foundation has emerged as a voice for cloud customers, enabling them to influence cloud providers to achieve key goals, such as FOCUS, the de facto standard for common cloud cost reporting," he said.

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Cloud-Native Technologies Become Enterprise Standard

When the cloud first emerged, it was all about virtual machines (VM). In 2024, it has been all about so-called "cloud-native" technologies.

The report highlights a significant shift in how enterprises approach cloud-native technologies, including Kubernetes and containers. Approximately 38% of U.S. enterprise cloud decision-makers plan to adopt Kubernetes in public and/or private clouds. The adoption rate for Kubernetes across both public and private clouds signifies a major transition toward cloud-native architectures as the default choice for new applications and modernization efforts.

The report indicates that developers are increasingly using containers and serverless technologies alongside traditional virtual machines, creating a hybrid approach to cloud infrastructure.

AI Drives Cloud Strategy Despite Economic Challenges

AI has emerged as a key driver for cloud expansion, overshadowing economic concerns that might otherwise constrain technology investments. The report reveals that AI/ML stands as the most critical area for talent development, with nearly a quarter of organizations hiring new staff and an equal proportion focusing on retraining existing teams.

Related:Our Cloud Storage Provider Went Down. Now I’m Rethinking Our Strategy.

The cloud's role in AI deployment is multifaceted. Organizations are using cloud platforms to:

Multicloud Is the Key to Enterprise Resilience

Outages in public clouds in recent years, including AWS outages in June 2023 and July 2024, have pushed resilience to the forefront of cloud strategies.

The disruptions have prompted enterprises to adopt multiple cloud providers as a resilience measure. Multicloud, however, does have its own set of challenges. Sustar said companies adopt multicloud strategies for a variety of reasons — a need to mitigate the risk of vendor concentration, variation of workloads by cloud providers, and regional or national needs. In his view, that poses a challenge to maintaining resilience across IT operations, which is a key driver in the growth of the observability and AIOps market.

"Adopting multicloud inevitably means accepting more complexity and costs," Sustar said.