Cloud Adoption Among the Fortune 500

Parametrix estimates that 468 members of the Fortune 500, or 93.6%, have a significant reliance on the cloud for at least some of their activities. We call them Cloud Users.

Cloud adoption varies by sector. Some industries lag behind due to their operational nature. Others have been slower to move away from legacy systems. 

We split Fortune 500 companies into 18 sectors. All the companies in ten sectors are cloud users – indicating a significant reliance on the cloud. Only one sector (Energy, Utilities & Waste, at 79.3%) has a Cloud User rate of less than 80% of companies. 

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Of the subset of 468 Cloud User companies among the Fortune 500, another 19 (3.8%) are excluded from Parametrix research for one of three principal reasons: 

1. ‍They are conglomerates. Holding companies which primarily own portions of multiple other companies could not be integrated into the analysis because the companies owned span a variety of sectors and manage their operational and insurance risk independently. ‍
2. They are cloud services providers (including Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, and others) or they operate an internal cloud and therefore do not rely on a third-party provider (Meta, IBM, and others). Evaluation of the impact of downtime on these cloud providers and operators themselves goes well beyond the scope of this study.‍
3. Insufficient information is available. Scanning results proved insufficient to determine the nature of the cloud infrastructure of a small number of Fortune 500 companies.

Removal of these 19 companies from the scope of the study causes an understatement of the impact of the events analyzed on the Fortune 500, but it does not particularly diminish the value of the conclusions and insights drawn.

About two-thirds of global cloud services supply is provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). These three providers lead provision among the in-scope Fortune 500 companies. 

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The total exceeds 100% because some companies use multiple cloud service providers.

AWS clearly dominates cloud services provision to the Fortune 500. MS Azure has a larger share relative to its overall market share due to high adoption rates in larger companies. GCP is under-represented among the Fortune 500 relative to its overall market share, but it has a greater share of the market for cloud services provision to small and medium-sized entities.

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Parametrix’s analysis on the Fortune 500 provides a snapshot of cloud usage, and insights into navigating the landscape of cyber systemic risk. This post is the second in a series about identifying dependencies, monitoring performance, and managing accumulation. You can read more about it in the Parametrix report revealing the Fortune 500’s exposure to cloud downtime among the three major providers - Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.