2021 Cloud Predictions - Part 2

Following up the list of Application Performance Management Predictions, APMdigest also asked IT industry experts for their 2021 cloud predictions. Part 2 covers a variety of cloud issues.

Start with: 2021 Cloud Predictions - Part 1

PANDEMIC DRIVES CLOUD MIGRATION

The disruption brought about by COVID-19 has seen the acceleration of cloud adoption, with 91 percent of enterprise IT environments now relying on cloud solutions. We can expect the cloud's popularity to continue to grow because of its proven track record with businesses, who have successfully used the technology to rapidly respond to issues with targeted solutions. As adoption continues to accelerate among enterprises, hybrid, multi-cloud environments in particular will be a critical focus area. These technologies will offer the capacity needed to provide businesses with speed, control and security, as they prepare themselves to better work and operate with the cloud.
Avishai Sharlin
Division President, Amdocs Technology

The move to cloud and SaaS will accelerate. As IT teams get their budgets back, digital transformation projects such as the move to the cloud or SaaS will accelerate in 2021. With most people not working from a physical office anymore, traditional data centers will officially become a thing of the past. It is no longer just the cost justification that encourages companies to make the move, but the fact that they have no physical personnel to staff a physical data center. This will create a mass exodus to the cloud.
Adi Mendel
Director of Product Management, Aternity

Migration to the cloud will become a must-have in 2021. In 2020, we saw businesses challenged as their workforces shifted to remote overnight. The pandemic became a catalyst for organizations to shift from on-prem software solutions and turn instead to the cloud in order to survive. Educational institutions and local governments — long-standing holdouts in the shift to the cloud — will finally realize they must create a roadmap to making this transition possible. In 2021, we'll see that even highly regulated industries can deploy cloud services quickly and securely to drive new business models and innovation. Business processes will be the first thing to go to the cloud, because it allows for quick deployment and versatility.
Thomas Phelps
CIO, Laserfiche

As we enter into a new year, cloud and serverless technology will play a vital role in adapting to a pandemic-focused world. With employees more spread out than ever before, IT teams will rely on cloud infrastructure to help manage information in a more streamlined way. Leveraging cloud will allow for employees to easily access and share data, while also enabling IT teams to better manage the IT systems by keeping information in one central location without the need for physical servers. With the shift toward remote work becoming more permanent, cloud and serverless technologies will help IT teams better support the workforce, regardless of location.
Mike Fuhrman
COO, Cloud and Managed Services, Flexential

CLOUD REQUIRED FOR SURVIVAL

Cloud adoption will continue to accelerate due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The greatest evidence has been seen in the boom of SaaS companies, which reflects increased usage because of particular needs that developed due to restrictions created by the pandemic. There was suddenly a prominent need for new services that had to be cloud hosted. With that momentum, we can see that cloud computing, and particularly serverless computing, is inevitable. It is the future for a large segment of the market. The innovation that is created by companies that adopt cloud and serverless is going to far exceed old legacy ways of working. There will be many companies that ultimately fail because they weren't able to adopt to a cloud computing model fast enough and they will be beaten out by smaller companies that will swiftly surpass them simply by being able to recreate their businesses much faster because they are focusing on value and not infrastructure.
Rodric Rabbah
CTO and Co-Founder, Nimbella

CLOUD DEMOCRATIZES COMPUTING POWER

Cloud is about how companies do computing, not where companies do computing. The public cloud markedly democratizes access to computing. A startup may instantly have access to the same compute power that its biggest competitive has. This is a huge change compared to how things were even a decade ago. 2021 will demonstrate this even more dramatically.
Kerem Koca
Co-Founder, Managing Director, Blue.Cloud

CLOUD RESTARTS AND UPDATES

2021 is the year companies restart and update their cloud journeys. Businesses have been jolted by the need to transform during the pandemic whether they were ready or not. Next year, they'll take a breath to figure out how to be strategic about their cloud strategies and make the necessary adjustments. Truly understanding the digital mandate will be the difference between survival and making the cloud transition happen — or getting weighed down in the past. That's why we'll see cloud restarts and updates as businesses figure out how to implement cloud — including hybrid and multi-cloud — effectively.
Ed Macosky
Head of Product, Boomi

MIGRATING MISSION-CRITICAL APPLICATIONS TO THE CLOUD

As the scalability and flexibility benefits of cloud continue to prove out, companies will consider moving their most complex and mission-critical applications, ERPs and databases to the cloud. Concerns about the ability to meet 99.99% SLAs in the cloud have many companies slow to migrate these essential systems where SLAs only apply to hardware availability. More companies will look to implement sophisticated application-aware high availability solutions to provide the same level of protection for applications and data as they get in traditional on-premises environments.
Cassius Rhue
VP, Customer Experience, SIOS Technology

ESTABLISHING CLOUD MANAGEMENT IN THE PLANNING STAGE

Cloud migration will be the genie that won't go back in the bottle: Enterprises know that cloud migration can help them save money and effort; this trend has been accelerated thanks to the pandemic's impacts. But building the architecture is only 50 percent of strategy — many enterprises overlook how to address day-to-day operations, management and deployment as part of their cloud migration strategy. In 2021, businesses will realize the importance of establishing these processes early in the planning stage. They will also attempt to remain provider-agnostic, avoiding vendor lock-in to maximize their benefits and cost-savings.
Eric Raab
SVP, Engineering and Product , ibi

AI AND ML AUGMENT CLOUD MANAGEMENT

Machine learning and AIOPs will accelerate the management of cloud migration and monitoring. Data from these AIOPs/ML initiatives will require a hi-fidelity approach to de-risk cloud management.
Kash Shaikh
CEO and President, Virtana

This year forced digital transformation into overdrive and this newfound reliance on the cloud will extend far beyond the pandemic. As enterprises continue to migrate their apps, operations and databases to the cloud, the age-old challenge of optimization will be brought to the forefront but more complex than ever before. For enterprises, the flexibility of the cloud and cloud-native code, combined with the rapidity of code delivery brought on by CI/CD practices, makes it nearly impossible to know what to optimize and how to optimize it. The rising number of cloud apps must be optimized continuously to maintain performance while avoiding issues like cost creep (brought on by overprovisioning, unforeseen deployments, mismanaged scaling, etc.), but humans alone can't find the answers at the required scale and speed. That's where AI comes in.
Amir Sharif
VP of Product and Marketing, Opsani

CLOUD ENGINEERING

Cloud engineering will become a key role in software development: Throughout the last decade, software developers have played the biggest role in developing, testing, and deploying new applications and services. However, distributed architectures are changing developer workflows, making infrastructure teams a bigger component in the popular DevOps process of application development. Expect this fundamental shift to change the way organizations approach team dynamics, with cloud engineers becoming increasingly valuable due to their expertise in deploying and managing cloud infrastructure.
Joe Duffy
CEO, Pulumi

CLOUD SKILLS GAP

With cloud adoption advanced, the need for greater skills for cloud and AI technologies will accelerate and create skill gaps that need to be closed in 2022 and beyond.
Kash Shaikh
CEO and President, Virtana

CLOUD SECURITY TAKES CENTER STAGE

Companies are still thinking technology first, not strategy first when it comes to the cloud. This can be seen in every company because the public cloud is still post-its and passwords with no clear-cut answer on who is responsible for cloud security privileges. There is so much great enabling technology in the cloud, but organizations haven't thought through how to properly use it to their advantage. I predict that next year we'll see security and governance take center stage. Everyone thinks of the cloud as a cost-effective and efficient solution, but the key that they're missing is the governance model. This is where the enterprise data cloud comes in and we'll see a realization and shift of focus to security and governance next year. It's simple, if you don't have a strong security and governance system in place, then anyone can access your data and you risk leaving yourself vulnerable to outside hackers or insider threats.
Anupam Singh
Chief Customer Officer, Cloudera

ALL SOFTWARE WILL BE CLOUD SOFTWARE

In 2021, all software will touch the cloud in some way: Today’s most popular IT architectures are quickly moving towards distributed applications, creating a global network of compute and storage to support modern software development. In 2021, expect all developers to have the cloud in mind when building or deploying new solutions and services. Unlike client-server applications that were popular just five years ago, managed cloud services have fundamentally changed the building blocks of app design. As a result, every piece of software, including mobile apps, will soon be defined by their capacity to take advantage of the cloud. All software will truly be cloud software.
Joe Duffy
CEO, Pulumi

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Keys to Building a Partner Ecosystem That Scales

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

How AI Agents Are Reshaping DataOps for the Always-On Enterprise

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

AI Deepfakes: Rethinking Trust in the Workplace

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Nine in Ten Enterprises Plan Cloud Data Repatriation amid Rising Cloud Costs and Data Sovereignty Mandates

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Why ITOps Need Right-Sized AI, Not Bigger Models

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

The End of Reactive DevOps: AI-Driven Observability for Zero-Defect Digital Systems

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

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Why Moving Off the Cloud Is the Easy Part and What Comes Next Is Where Things Get Hard

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

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2021 Cloud Predictions - Part 2

Following up the list of Application Performance Management Predictions, APMdigest also asked IT industry experts for their 2021 cloud predictions. Part 2 covers a variety of cloud issues.

Start with: 2021 Cloud Predictions - Part 1

PANDEMIC DRIVES CLOUD MIGRATION

The disruption brought about by COVID-19 has seen the acceleration of cloud adoption, with 91 percent of enterprise IT environments now relying on cloud solutions. We can expect the cloud's popularity to continue to grow because of its proven track record with businesses, who have successfully used the technology to rapidly respond to issues with targeted solutions. As adoption continues to accelerate among enterprises, hybrid, multi-cloud environments in particular will be a critical focus area. These technologies will offer the capacity needed to provide businesses with speed, control and security, as they prepare themselves to better work and operate with the cloud.
Avishai Sharlin
Division President, Amdocs Technology

The move to cloud and SaaS will accelerate. As IT teams get their budgets back, digital transformation projects such as the move to the cloud or SaaS will accelerate in 2021. With most people not working from a physical office anymore, traditional data centers will officially become a thing of the past. It is no longer just the cost justification that encourages companies to make the move, but the fact that they have no physical personnel to staff a physical data center. This will create a mass exodus to the cloud.
Adi Mendel
Director of Product Management, Aternity

Migration to the cloud will become a must-have in 2021. In 2020, we saw businesses challenged as their workforces shifted to remote overnight. The pandemic became a catalyst for organizations to shift from on-prem software solutions and turn instead to the cloud in order to survive. Educational institutions and local governments — long-standing holdouts in the shift to the cloud — will finally realize they must create a roadmap to making this transition possible. In 2021, we'll see that even highly regulated industries can deploy cloud services quickly and securely to drive new business models and innovation. Business processes will be the first thing to go to the cloud, because it allows for quick deployment and versatility.
Thomas Phelps
CIO, Laserfiche

As we enter into a new year, cloud and serverless technology will play a vital role in adapting to a pandemic-focused world. With employees more spread out than ever before, IT teams will rely on cloud infrastructure to help manage information in a more streamlined way. Leveraging cloud will allow for employees to easily access and share data, while also enabling IT teams to better manage the IT systems by keeping information in one central location without the need for physical servers. With the shift toward remote work becoming more permanent, cloud and serverless technologies will help IT teams better support the workforce, regardless of location.
Mike Fuhrman
COO, Cloud and Managed Services, Flexential

CLOUD REQUIRED FOR SURVIVAL

Cloud adoption will continue to accelerate due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The greatest evidence has been seen in the boom of SaaS companies, which reflects increased usage because of particular needs that developed due to restrictions created by the pandemic. There was suddenly a prominent need for new services that had to be cloud hosted. With that momentum, we can see that cloud computing, and particularly serverless computing, is inevitable. It is the future for a large segment of the market. The innovation that is created by companies that adopt cloud and serverless is going to far exceed old legacy ways of working. There will be many companies that ultimately fail because they weren't able to adopt to a cloud computing model fast enough and they will be beaten out by smaller companies that will swiftly surpass them simply by being able to recreate their businesses much faster because they are focusing on value and not infrastructure.
Rodric Rabbah
CTO and Co-Founder, Nimbella

CLOUD DEMOCRATIZES COMPUTING POWER

Cloud is about how companies do computing, not where companies do computing. The public cloud markedly democratizes access to computing. A startup may instantly have access to the same compute power that its biggest competitive has. This is a huge change compared to how things were even a decade ago. 2021 will demonstrate this even more dramatically.
Kerem Koca
Co-Founder, Managing Director, Blue.Cloud

CLOUD RESTARTS AND UPDATES

2021 is the year companies restart and update their cloud journeys. Businesses have been jolted by the need to transform during the pandemic whether they were ready or not. Next year, they'll take a breath to figure out how to be strategic about their cloud strategies and make the necessary adjustments. Truly understanding the digital mandate will be the difference between survival and making the cloud transition happen — or getting weighed down in the past. That's why we'll see cloud restarts and updates as businesses figure out how to implement cloud — including hybrid and multi-cloud — effectively.
Ed Macosky
Head of Product, Boomi

MIGRATING MISSION-CRITICAL APPLICATIONS TO THE CLOUD

As the scalability and flexibility benefits of cloud continue to prove out, companies will consider moving their most complex and mission-critical applications, ERPs and databases to the cloud. Concerns about the ability to meet 99.99% SLAs in the cloud have many companies slow to migrate these essential systems where SLAs only apply to hardware availability. More companies will look to implement sophisticated application-aware high availability solutions to provide the same level of protection for applications and data as they get in traditional on-premises environments.
Cassius Rhue
VP, Customer Experience, SIOS Technology

ESTABLISHING CLOUD MANAGEMENT IN THE PLANNING STAGE

Cloud migration will be the genie that won't go back in the bottle: Enterprises know that cloud migration can help them save money and effort; this trend has been accelerated thanks to the pandemic's impacts. But building the architecture is only 50 percent of strategy — many enterprises overlook how to address day-to-day operations, management and deployment as part of their cloud migration strategy. In 2021, businesses will realize the importance of establishing these processes early in the planning stage. They will also attempt to remain provider-agnostic, avoiding vendor lock-in to maximize their benefits and cost-savings.
Eric Raab
SVP, Engineering and Product , ibi

AI AND ML AUGMENT CLOUD MANAGEMENT

Machine learning and AIOPs will accelerate the management of cloud migration and monitoring. Data from these AIOPs/ML initiatives will require a hi-fidelity approach to de-risk cloud management.
Kash Shaikh
CEO and President, Virtana

This year forced digital transformation into overdrive and this newfound reliance on the cloud will extend far beyond the pandemic. As enterprises continue to migrate their apps, operations and databases to the cloud, the age-old challenge of optimization will be brought to the forefront but more complex than ever before. For enterprises, the flexibility of the cloud and cloud-native code, combined with the rapidity of code delivery brought on by CI/CD practices, makes it nearly impossible to know what to optimize and how to optimize it. The rising number of cloud apps must be optimized continuously to maintain performance while avoiding issues like cost creep (brought on by overprovisioning, unforeseen deployments, mismanaged scaling, etc.), but humans alone can't find the answers at the required scale and speed. That's where AI comes in.
Amir Sharif
VP of Product and Marketing, Opsani

CLOUD ENGINEERING

Cloud engineering will become a key role in software development: Throughout the last decade, software developers have played the biggest role in developing, testing, and deploying new applications and services. However, distributed architectures are changing developer workflows, making infrastructure teams a bigger component in the popular DevOps process of application development. Expect this fundamental shift to change the way organizations approach team dynamics, with cloud engineers becoming increasingly valuable due to their expertise in deploying and managing cloud infrastructure.
Joe Duffy
CEO, Pulumi

CLOUD SKILLS GAP

With cloud adoption advanced, the need for greater skills for cloud and AI technologies will accelerate and create skill gaps that need to be closed in 2022 and beyond.
Kash Shaikh
CEO and President, Virtana

CLOUD SECURITY TAKES CENTER STAGE

Companies are still thinking technology first, not strategy first when it comes to the cloud. This can be seen in every company because the public cloud is still post-its and passwords with no clear-cut answer on who is responsible for cloud security privileges. There is so much great enabling technology in the cloud, but organizations haven't thought through how to properly use it to their advantage. I predict that next year we'll see security and governance take center stage. Everyone thinks of the cloud as a cost-effective and efficient solution, but the key that they're missing is the governance model. This is where the enterprise data cloud comes in and we'll see a realization and shift of focus to security and governance next year. It's simple, if you don't have a strong security and governance system in place, then anyone can access your data and you risk leaving yourself vulnerable to outside hackers or insider threats.
Anupam Singh
Chief Customer Officer, Cloudera

ALL SOFTWARE WILL BE CLOUD SOFTWARE

In 2021, all software will touch the cloud in some way: Today’s most popular IT architectures are quickly moving towards distributed applications, creating a global network of compute and storage to support modern software development. In 2021, expect all developers to have the cloud in mind when building or deploying new solutions and services. Unlike client-server applications that were popular just five years ago, managed cloud services have fundamentally changed the building blocks of app design. As a result, every piece of software, including mobile apps, will soon be defined by their capacity to take advantage of the cloud. All software will truly be cloud software.
Joe Duffy
CEO, Pulumi

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

Keys to Building a Partner Ecosystem That Scales

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

How AI Agents Are Reshaping DataOps for the Always-On Enterprise

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

AI Deepfakes: Rethinking Trust in the Workplace

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Nine in Ten Enterprises Plan Cloud Data Repatriation amid Rising Cloud Costs and Data Sovereignty Mandates

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Why ITOps Need Right-Sized AI, Not Bigger Models

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

The End of Reactive DevOps: AI-Driven Observability for Zero-Defect Digital Systems

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

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New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Why Moving Off the Cloud Is the Easy Part and What Comes Next Is Where Things Get Hard

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 24: Network Observability Tool Sprawl

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

Capacity Isn't a Guess: Observability-Driven Sizing for On-Prem Databases

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...