CloudForge
Annual Research Report

The Cloud Report 2026

Annual State of Cloud Infrastructure

Based on CTO and VP Engineering interviews across 6 industries, combined with anonymised operational data from our cloud audits and enterprise migrations.

Key Findings at a Glance

  1. Cloud Cost Continues to Climb — Despite FinOps adoption growing 40% year-over-year, the average organisation still wastes 32% of its cloud spend.
  2. Platform Engineering Goes Mainstream — Internal Developer Platforms moved from experiment to standard.
  3. Security Shifts Left — Finally — Container image scanning in CI/CD pipelines crossed 60% adoption.
  4. The Talent Gap Persists — Certified cloud and DevOps engineers remain the hardest-to-fill roles.
  5. AI Infrastructure Emerges — GPU orchestration, ML pipeline automation, and inference serving are the fastest-growing infrastructure categories — but operational maturity lags far behind adoption.
  6. Multi-Cloud Reality Check — Multi-cloud strategies are becoming default enterprise posture, but operational complexity is rising faster than most organisations can absorb.
  7. Edge Computing Enters Production — Edge computing moved from PoC to production workloads in 2025, driven by latency requirements, data sovereignty, and AI inference demands.
  8. Developer Experience Becomes a Metric — Engineering leaders are finally measuring developer experience (DevEx) as a first-class productivity metric alongside DORA.
Section 1

Cloud Cost Continues to Climb

Despite FinOps adoption growing 40% year-over-year, the average organisation still wastes 32% of its cloud spend. Reserved instance coverage remains below 50% for most.

  • 68% of organisations report cloud spend exceeding budget by 20%+
  • Only 23% have real-time cost anomaly detection in place
  • FinOps teams that report to engineering (not finance) achieve 2.4x better savings outcomes
Section 2

Platform Engineering Goes Mainstream

Internal Developer Platforms moved from experiment to standard. 72% of mid-market and enterprise organisations now have a dedicated platform team.

  • Teams with self-service infrastructure provisioning ship 3.2x faster
  • Backstage adoption grew 180% — but 40% of deployments stall at the catalog phase
  • Golden paths reduce onboarding time from weeks to hours when maintained by dedicated platform teams
Section 3

Security Shifts Left — Finally

Container image scanning in CI/CD pipelines crossed 60% adoption. SBOM generation is the fastest-growing DevSecOps practice, driven by regulatory pressure.

  • 61% of organisations now scan container images before deployment
  • SBOM generation adoption grew 320% year-over-year, driven by DORA and FDA requirements
  • Zero-trust network architecture adoption reached 34%, up from 18% in 2024
Section 4

The Talent Gap Persists

Certified cloud and DevOps engineers remain the hardest-to-fill roles. The gap between demand and supply widened for the third consecutive year.

  • CKA/CKAD-certified engineers command 35% salary premium over non-certified peers
  • Average time-to-hire for senior platform engineers is 97 days
  • 78% of CTOs cite staffing as a bigger constraint than budget for cloud initiatives
Section 5

AI Infrastructure Emerges

GPU orchestration, ML pipeline automation, and inference serving are the fastest-growing infrastructure categories — but operational maturity lags far behind adoption.

  • 54% of organisations are running ML workloads in production, up from 31% in 2024
  • GPU utilisation averages 22% — comparable to early cloud VM waste patterns
  • Only 12% have automated ML pipeline CI/CD equivalent to their application delivery pipelines
Section 6

Multi-Cloud Reality Check

Multi-cloud strategies are becoming default enterprise posture, but operational complexity is rising faster than most organisations can absorb.

  • 62% of enterprises now use 2+ cloud providers, up from 48% in 2024
  • Only 19% have unified observability across all cloud providers
  • Networking costs between clouds account for 8-15% of total cloud spend on average
  • Teams managing multi-cloud report 2.1x higher operational overhead than single-cloud teams
Section 7

Edge Computing Enters Production

Edge computing moved from PoC to production workloads in 2025, driven by latency requirements, data sovereignty, and AI inference demands.

  • 41% of organisations now run production workloads at the edge, up from 17% in 2024
  • Edge inference for ML models grew 290% year-over-year, led by retail and manufacturing
  • Cloudflare Workers and AWS Lambda@Edge combined handle 3x more requests than traditional edge CDNs
  • Data sovereignty regulations in EU and APAC are the primary driver for 56% of edge deployments
Section 8

Developer Experience Becomes a Metric

Engineering leaders are finally measuring developer experience (DevEx) as a first-class productivity metric alongside DORA.

  • 38% of engineering orgs now track developer satisfaction scores, up from 12% in 2023
  • Teams with dedicated platform engineering report 47% higher developer satisfaction than those without
  • Average time from commit to production deployment decreased to 23 minutes for top-quartile organisations
  • Self-service infrastructure provisioning reduced ticket-based requests by 78% in organisations that adopted it

Methodology

The Cloud Report 2026 is based on structured interviews with over 200 CTOs, VP Engineering leaders, and Head of Platform roles across six industries: financial services, healthcare, e-commerce, SaaS, manufacturing, and media. Interviews were conducted between September 2025 and January 2026, with each session lasting 45-60 minutes and covering cloud strategy, spend patterns, team structure, and operational maturity.

Quantitative data is drawn from anonymised operational metrics across cloud audits and enterprise migrations performed by CloudForge. All identifying information has been removed. Percentage-based findings reflect the interview sample unless otherwise noted. Where applicable, we cross-referenced findings with publicly available industry surveys to validate directional accuracy.

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