Obvious costs include the budget for a tech vendor you use to send and analyze surveys or incentives for customers.

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%).

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.

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.

Healthcare organizations (HCOs) increasingly rely on cloud platforms for advanced genomic sequencing, precise temperature- and time-specific delivery, access to cutting-edge data center technologies, and SaaS solutions provided by independent software vendors (ISVs). Over the past few years, the cloud has been instrumental in helping HCOs become more adaptable, capable, resilient, and innovative.

Pros include cloud agnostic security and best-of-breed features. Each individual component is cloud agnostic, leading to outstanding multicloud coverage, and customers can augment this by weaving in pieces from their various cloud service providers. Customers will benefit from best-of-breed technology and relationships with vendors that are more focused on innovation in that particular discipline.