Following up the list of Application Performance Management Predictions, APMdigest also asked IT industry experts for their 2021 cloud predictions. Part 1 covers multicloud and hybrid cloud.

MULTICLOUD ADOPTION ACCELERATES

Multi-cloud cloud will become the new normal for data; native capabilities for interactions between the major public clouds will increase, and third-party solutions enabling seamless data movement between public clouds will proliferate. However, public cloud providers will still keep adding to their proprietary stack trying to keep customers mostly within their walled garden, but the trend of organizations wanting multiple providers to compete for their business will force them to interoperate better.
Yiannis Antoniou
Analyst, Gigaom

By the end of 2021, multi-cloud will be the default operating mode for large enterprises. Software that enables high performance and cost-effective workflows in such environments will be a prerequisite for enterprises to move fast and innovate. Distributed, on-location compute, on-demand data access, centralized governance are the keywords that enable true cloud independence while adhering to performance requirements.
Kristo Iila
VP of Engineering, Intertrust

Multicloud adoption will continue to accelerate as the global pandemic keeps work and learning remote through 2021. According to 451 Research, enterprises anticipate workloads primarily executed in cloud-based external environments to increase from 36% in 2020 to 63% in 2022. As organizations and managed service providers accelerate cloud initiatives to support remote work and learning amid the COVID-19 pandemic, they will gain a deeper understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of each public cloud provider. After understanding the different types of applications that run better in which cloud, the need for adopting more than one cloud provider will become clearer. In a recent survey, Gartner found that 81% of organizations work with two or more cloud providers already. The trend toward multicloud adoption will only accelerate in 2021, and the disparity of tools used by enterprises creates demand for a consistent management solution to maintain visibility and control, as well as reduce costs.
Keith Neilson
Technical Evangelist, CloudSphere

Many enterprises claim they are multi-cloud today, but in reality they are just using multiple clouds individually and paying multiple cloud providers. These organizations typically only run each application in one single cloud provider (even if that application may be in multiple locations in that cloud). But true multi-cloud requires a modular approach: for example, running microservice A of an app in Azure and microservice B in AWS. This true multi-cloud approach, which will continue gaining steam over the next 12 months, will better embrace the strengths of each cloud provider, allowing organizations to leverage critical specialties of each cloud, as well as maximizes resiliency and compliance.
Ankur Singla
CEO, Volterra

MULTICLOUD CHALLENGES

As companies become more multi-cloud oriented, it will become even more critical to choose tools that work across all clouds. Even as companies move to a multi-cloud approach, they're still battling the lock-in challenges associated with different cloud vendors, creating complications for companies looking to mature and scale after the pandemic this year.
Justin Borgman
CEO, Starburst Data

Channel partners become more important as enterprises want more guidance to know what to do before they execute a public cloud strategy. The business problems are more complex, the cloud offering is more varied. Multi-cloud management will only be more complex in 2022.
Kash Shaikh
CEO and President, Virtana

RETHINKING MULTI-CLOUD

The benefits of a multi-cloud strategy have been hyped significantly and include everything from flexibility and reliability to cost-performance optimization. But deploying data and workloads across multiple clouds shouldn't be an industry best practice. According to a 2020 IDG survey, 55% of organizations use two or more public clouds, but 79% struggle to achieve synergy across their multiple platforms. Now and in the future, we'll see a growing number of companies rethink multi-cloud or consolidate around a single cloud provider.
Patrick Hubbard
Head Geek, SolarWinds

HYBRID CLOUD ADOPTION ACCELERATES

Hybrid approaches seamlessly bridging on-premises and cloud capabilities around data will become stronger and more widespread. Similarly, to the multi-cloud future, organizations will want to combine their on-premises data needs with the native cloud capabilities in a transparent way. The location of data will become practically invisible and there will be one-click movement and combination of data from multiple on-premises data centers and public cloud providers. This will allow for better compliance to data protection regulations in a localized manner; hedging of organizational bets around elastic infrastructure; and cost-efficiencies and arbitrage for organizations taking advantage of temporary pricing fluctuations between public cloud providers.
Yiannis Antoniou
Analyst, Gigaom

KUBERNETES MAKES HYBRID CLOUD POSSIBLE

Everyone wants hybrid cloud, and hybrid cloud relies on one thing: federated Kubernetes. This idea has been the twinkle in the developer community's eye since 2015. 2021 is the year that we see a proper implementation of that to the point where organizations can truly have a hybrid cloud. Without federated Kubernetes, organizations must contend with disparate components living in different clouds but not able to truly integrate with one another.
Boris Kurktchiev
Field CTO, Diamanti

HYBRID CLOUD MANAGEMENT PLATFORMS

More enterprises will deploy a hybrid cloud management platform for on-going cost control, observability, and real-time analytics for all IT operations initiatives.
Kash Shaikh
CEO and President, Virtana

BUSINESS CONTINUITY AND DR DRIVE HYBRID AND MULTICLOUD

Business continuity and disaster recovery will drive adoption of hybrid cloud and multicloud configurations. As Cloud adoption takes center stage in IT infrastructure configurations, companies will begin using more hybrid and multi-cloud configurations to solve long-standing challenges to business continuity and disaster recovery. Companies will increasingly use the cloud to enable geographically separated offsite replication or failover for disaster protection. They will look to extend failover clustering not only across cloud availability zones but across different cloud vendors. The expansion of private cloud usage brought on by the growth of the increasing availability needs of the applications required for monitoring this new, broad class of IoT devices.
Cassius Rhue
VP, Customer Experience, SIOS Technology

ON-PREMISE WILL BECOME LEGACY

We will continue to see hybrid cloud and multi-cloud. Why will we continue to see hybrids? Don't look at what is changing; look at what is not changing. And what is not changing is that companies cannot just move everything into the cloud in a heartbeat. This will take them years, even if they're fully behind the initiative. For that reason, you will continue to see hybrids. We are headed into a future where on-premise is seen as legacy.
Stijn "Stan" Christiaens
Co-Founder and CTO, Collibra

In 2021, increased cloud demand will continue to occur at the expense of legacy IT providers as the on-premise addressable market shrinks. This trend will continue to ramp up further.
Kerem Koca
Co-Founder, Managing Director, Blue.Cloud

Go to: 2021 Cloud Predictions - Part 2