SUSE released the findings from its inaugural Cloud and AI Pulse Survey, revealing that a growing number of enterprises are turning to hybrid (59%) and private (16%) cloud due to technical and business concerns and digital sovereignty requirements.
The global survey of nearly 600 enterprise technology leaders in the U.S., UK, Japan, India and Germany examined the impact of AI on cloud adoption, budgets, governance, IT priorities and resilience. In the U.S., amidst shifting global sentiment, one-third (31%) cited digital sovereignty as a top tech priority this year, fueled by the need for open source support and vendor lock-in concerns.
“While it was no surprise that more than half of survey respondents say implementing AI is a major challenge, we were encouraged by the impact AI is having on hybrid and private cloud adoption and digital sovereignty as it relates to AI model training data,” said Margaret Dawson, Chief Marketing Officer at SUSE. “This new data confirms what we are seeing from customers; priorities are shifting toward more flexible, scalable and governed deployments.”
AI Drives New Set of Priorities
As AI increases system complexity, risk exposure and priorities are shifting toward scalable and governed deployments.
- Globally, implementing AI ranked as either a critical (24%) or major (37%) challenge.
- When it comes to AI model training, digital sovereignty is becoming a defining requirement cited as either extremely (42%) or very (40%) important.
- Four out of five countries cited implementing AI as their top budget priority line item.
- In Germany, AI implementation ranked only twelfth as a critical challenge, but second as a budget priority, indicating a notable gap between perceived urgency and investment.
Hybrid Cloud and Open Source Resurgence
Across the globe, data reveals that respondents are re-architecting AI environments around control and compliance. Hybrid and multi-cloud were cited as strong options, providing the ability to support regulated, sensitive, and edge workloads while maintaining operational flexibility.
This shift away from public cloud is consistent with the larger industry movement fueled by AI, such as the buildout of private AI factories, which is expected to reach 20% adoption this year, according to Forrester, alongside the growth of on-premises servers to manage local compute costs, performance, and data governance requirements.
- 59% of organizations plan to prioritize hybrid cloud deployments for workloads where digital sovereignty is required, with 16% relying purely on private cloud.
- Over half (51%) plan to spend more on scaling across multiple cloud environments.
- Nearly half (46%) are increasing their investment in enterprise support for Open Source.
- On average, the top three priorities globally were as follows:
- Skills gaps and talent shortages
- Enhanced security
- Implementing AI
