RightScale, now a part of Flexera, has published its annual state of the cloud report. Every year Flexera does a survey of enterprises and SMBs to analyze the adoption of cloud.

This year, Flexera surveyed over 750 technical professionals on their adoption of cloud computing across a broad cross-section of organizations.

Out of the 750 respondents, 554 represented organizations with 1000+ employees while 196 respondents were from the SMB segment. The participating organizations for this survey are from the Americas, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region.

In early March, Flexera added a question to assess the impact of COVID-19 on cloud plans and progress; there were 187 responses.

Here are the key takeaways from the report:

1. Enterprises are betting big on hybrid and multi-cloud

Customers are continuing to invest in multiple cloud platforms. This includes both the public and private cloud usage. 93 percent of the respondents are implementing either a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud strategy.

2. Public cloud continues to grow at a rapid pace

16 percent of the respondents spend at least $12 million annually on the public cloud while 63 percent are spending at least $1.2 million per year. Among enterprises the spend is higher – 20 percent exceeding $12 million per year and 74 above $1.2 million per year.

3. COVID-19 will have a significant impact on cloud usage

A subset of 187 survey respondents indicated how they expect COVID-19 to affect their cloud plans. Over 50% of participants said cloud usage will be higher than initially planned. Some of the increase is a result of the extra capacity needed for current cloud-based applications to meet increased demand as online usage grows.