Four Trends Are Shaping the Future of Public Cloud

Four Trends Are Shaping the Future of Public Cloud
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Four new trends in cloud computing are continuing to expand the breadth of cloud offerings and capabilities, accelerating growth across all segments in the public cloud services market, according to Gartner. The four trends are: cloud ubiquity, regional cloud ecosystems, sustainability and carbon-intelligent cloud, and cloud infrastructure and platform service (CIPS) providers’ automated programmable infrastructure.

“The economic, organizational and societal impact of the pandemic will continue to serve as a catalyst for digital innovation and adoption of cloud services,“ said Henrique Cecci, senior research director at Gartner. “This is especially true for use cases such as collaboration, remote work and new digital services to support a hybrid workforce.“

Cloud Ubiquity:

Today, the cloud underpins most new technological disruptions, including composable business, and has proven itself during times of uncertainty with its resiliency, scalability, flexibility and speed. Hybrid, multicloud and edge environments are growing and setting the stage for new distributed cloud models. In addition, new wireless communications advances, such as 5G R16 and R17, will push cloud adoption to a new level of broader, deeper and ubiquitous usage. Use cases such as enhanced mobile banking experiences and healthcare transformation will also emerge.

As a result, global cloud adoption will continue to expand rapidly. Gartner forecasts end-user spending on public cloud services to reach $396 billion in 2021 and grow 21.7% to reach $482 billion in 2022. Additionally, by 2026, Gartner predicts public cloud spending will exceed 45% of all enterprise IT spending, up from less than 17% in 2021.

Regional Cloud Ecosystems:

Growing geopolitical regulatory fragmentation, protectionism and industry compliance are driving the creation of new regional and vertical cloud ecosystems and data services. Companies in the financial and public sectors are looking to reduce critical lock-in and single points of failure with their cloud providers outside of their country. Regions not able to create or sustain their own platform ecosystems will have no choice but to leverage the platforms created in other regions and resort to legislation and regulation to maintain some level of control and sovereignty. Concerns among politicians, academia and tech providers in these regions are increasing, leading to initiatives such as GAIA-X in European countries.

Sustainability and “Carbon-Intelligent“ Cloud:

Nearly half of the respondents in the 2021 Gartner CEO Survey believe climate change mitigation will have a significant impact on their business. Cloud providers are responding to this growing focus on sustainability by instituting more aggressive carbon-neutral corporate goals, which creates new challenges for infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders.

CIPS Providers’ Automated Programmable Infrastructure:

Gartner expects the broad adoption of fully managed and artificial intelligence-/machine-learning-enabled cloud services from hyperscale CIPS providers. This will rapidly eliminate the operational burden of traditional I&O roles in the public cloud.