SaaS is a hosted software solution that resides in a cloud environment, but the client is responsible for auditing the provider and securing data in transit. The software provider takes on the responsibility of the full stack outside of data in transit, backup, access, and usage. However, many software providers no longer own the data centers where their software runs. Many leverage IaaS vendors to host their software, splitting up the responsibility model even further.

Nearly 20% indicated that they use a hybrid strategy to address concerns about reliability and outages; while cloud provider outages are a concern, compliance with industry regulations is more likely to drive resilience strategies. A small share of enterprises use a hybrid strategy to avoid vendor lock-in (12%) or for M&A activity (12%).

How Tech Leaders Can Cut Power Demand, Costs, And Risk Across Hybrid IT

Similarly, a private general insurer addressing a $2 million annual cloud bill introduced real-time cost dashboards, alerts, access controls, and aggressive resource cleanup, including deleting more than 69,000 GB of unused storage. As a result, the insurer saved more than $600,000 annually (around 30% of total spend) and significantly reduced month-to-month cloud cost volatility. Risk mitigation includes cloud resilience and vendor lock-in.

Seventy-one percent of enterprise cloud strategy decision-makers reported having a FinOps practice. This growth reflects the need to manage rising AI infrastructure costs and optimize hybrid environments. Risk mitigation, including cloud resilience, vendor lock-in, and sovereignty. Organizations across Europe are increasingly concerned about overdependence on hyperscalers for infrastructure, AI, and data services. This spans risks related to vendor lock-in, resilience, and foreign control.

NBC aimed to avoid vendor lock-in and legacy contract constraints that slowed innovation, thereby gaining the flexibility to add capacity and capabilities without repeated contract renegotiations. Hybrid cloud is the dominant cloud operating model in Canada.

These partnerships enable retailers to modernize infrastructure, reduce operational costs, and launch new services faster, all while building internal cloud fluency and resilience. In many cases, these partnerships offer a solution specific to retail (i.e., industry cloud for retail).

Who Should Use The SaaS Vendor AI Questionnaire Template Without asking the right questions to substantiate a SaaS vendor’s AI capabilities, commitment to transparency, security, and ethics, companies unwittingly take on additional risk and regulatory exposure. Procurement pros should use these questions to augment RFPs to weed out marketing claims from actual capabilities and jump-start the risk-assessment process.

FinOps teams are increasingly common: 59% of cloud decision-makers at enterprises report having official teams in place, and 25% plan to adopt a FinOps practice in the next 12 months. Risk mitigation, including cloud resilience, vendor lock-in, and sovereignty. Organizations are revisiting resilience plans after recent hyperscaler outages and geopolitical tensions.

Sixty-three percent of cloud decision-makers at FSI enterprises are adopting multicloud container platforms on public clouds managed by the vendor, compared to 50% using managed Kubernetes services from a public cloud provider (see Figure 3). This reflects FSI industry interest mitigating vendor concentration risk with hyperscale cloud providers. The big FSI logos in the cloud-native ecosystem include BlackRock, Capital One, GEICO, ING, JPMorganChase, Liberty Mutual, and US Bank.