Four trends shaping the future of public cloud: Gartner

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Across all segments in the public cloud services market, there are four particular trends that are predicted to expand the breadth of cloud offerings and capabilities, 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, organisational 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.”

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 $396bn in 2021 and grow 21.7 per cent to reach $482bn in 2022. Additionally, by 2026, Gartner predicts public cloud spending will exceed 45 per cent of all enterprise IT spending, up from less than 17 per cent in 2021.

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.

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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.

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

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