Cloud Will Be the Centerpiece of New Digital Experiences

The ongoing pandemic and the surge in digital services are making the cloud the centerpiece of new digital experiences, according to Gartner. “There is no business strategy without a cloud strategy,“ said Milind Govekar, distinguished vice president at Gartner.

In 2022, global cloud revenue is estimated to total $474 billion, up from $408 billion in 2021. Over the next few years, Gartner analysts estimate cloud revenue will surpass non-cloud revenue for relevant enterprise IT markets. Gartner analysts said that more than 85% of organizations will embrace a cloud-first principle by 2025 and will not be able to fully execute their digital strategies without the use of cloud-native architectures and technologies.

“Adopting cloud-native platforms means that digital or product teams will use architectural principles and capabilities to take advantage of the inherent capabilities within the cloud environment,“ said Govekar. “New workloads deployed in a cloud-native environment will be pervasive, not just popular and anything non-cloud will be considered legacy.“

By 2025, Gartner estimates that over 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms, up from 30% in 2021. As the operating model changes, the organization will turn to a product-orientated operating model where the entire value stream of the business and IT will have to be aligned by products. This will create new roles and responsibilities, such as site reliability engineers, product managers, or communities of practices.

Application development will shift to application assembly and integration. The applications will be assembled and composed by the teams that use them. “The technological and organizational silos of application development, automation, integration, and governance will become obsolete,“ said Govekar. “This will drive the rise of low-code application platforms (LCAPs) and citizen development.“

By 2025, 70% of new applications developed by organizations will use low-code or no-code technologies, up from less than 25% in 2020. The rise of low-code application platforms (LCAPs) is driving the increase of citizen development, and notably the function of business technologists who report outside of IT departments and create technology or analytics capabilities for internal or external business use.

Cloud-delivered secure access service edge (SASE) presents the fastest growing opportunity in the networking and network security market. As most traffic from branches and edge computing locations will not go to an enterprise data center, CIOs and IT leaders will increasingly use SASE to secure the anywhere and anytime access needs from users and devices. Gartner estimates that in 2022, end-user spending on SASE will total $6.8 billion, up from $4.8 billion in 2021. In addition, by 2025, more than 50% of organizations will have explicit strategies to adopt SASE, up from less than 5% in 2020.