2022 Cloud Predictions

As part of APMdigest's list of 2022 predictions, industry experts offer thoughtful and insightful predictions on how Cloud will evolve and impact business in 2022.

CLOUD SERVICES MOVE UP STACK

Public cloud will not only become even more dominant, but the sophistication of the services they provide will increase and move "up stack," focusing on end-user experience and out-of-the-box usability rather than previous primitives that required experts to knit raw components together. Think of more complete solutions rather than just a bag of tools.
Damon Edwards
Director of Product Marketing, PagerDuty

CLOUD PROVIDERS OFFER OPENTELEMETRY

Cloud providers will begin to integrate OpenTelemetry into their managed service offerings, giving developers the ability to easily understand, profile, and tune their cloud native applications. We'll see more performance tools start to integrate cloud spend as a useful annotation, bringing FinOps into the performance landscape.
Austin Parker
Principal Developer Advocate , Lightstep

CLOUD PROVIDERS DELIVER METRICS

Cloud providers will begin to not only show metrics and logs, but also suggest baselines and success metrics based on their growing insight into medians and averages across their customer bases. With a large percentage of modern organizations running on the same infrastructure — whether it be AWS or Google Cloud — there's a rapidly growing collection of data that can be leveraged to help companies learn from one another.
John Egan
CEO and Co-Founder, Kintaba

EMBRACING REDUNDANCY

Organizations will embrace redundancy to mitigate continuing outages: Massive web outages and regional disasters will continue to take both public cloud and private datacenters offline in 2022. To mitigate this threat, organizations will increasingly seek redundancy for mission critical apps by deploying in multiple public clouds and leveraging private clouds. The tools to run modern apps — such as Kubernetes and other container-based technologies — interchangeably in the cloud or on-prem are maturing rapidly, providing new options for optimizing workload placement to ensure availability.
Jon Toor
CMO, Cloudian

CLOUD BACKUP AND RECOVERY

Enterprises' mass shift to the cloud during the pandemic has also come at a time when escalating cybersecurity and climate crises are putting data at greater risk than ever before. As a result, there's an urgent need for businesses to prioritize effective cloud backup and disaster recovery in 2022. Too many downtime incidents have made headlines in the past year, with companies like Facebook losing tens of millions of dollars due to outages. Backup and DR are imperative for these companies to ensure application performance and uptime.
Faiz Khan
CEO, Wanclouds

MOVING BACK TO PRIVATE CLOUD

Tech Savvy Organizations Are Beginning to Repatriate from the Public Cloud — The public cloud is alive and well and is not going anywhere; in fact, I predict it will grow 10-20x over the next decade. However, large, tech-savvy organizations are becoming much more judicious in how they use the cloud and will increasingly repatriate from their "all in cloud" stance. We'll start to see this shift happening in 2022. In much the same way that enterprises have embraced open source software and have opted to do it themselves, tech-savvy companies are beginning to realize they can run their own private cloud better and just use the public cloud for specific use cases such as usage bursts. Bank of America is one significant example of how a company can use private cloud to lower its IT costs, and I expect more large organizations will explore similar private cloud uses.
Marco Palladino
CTO and Co-Founder, Kong

CREATING CLOUD-LIKE ENVIRONMENTS ON-PREM

Instead of migrating legacy apps to the cloud, organizations will create cloud-like environments on prem: Containers and cloud-native storage technologies have created new paths to building private cloud infrastructure. Now organizations can get the benefits of public cloud at less cost, with greater control, and with the option to extend infrastructure to the edge. Gartner projects that 75% of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed outside centralized data centers or the cloud by 2025, driving new requirements for data management and analytics at the edge. The private cloud will give organizations new options for deploying modern applications, allowing them to make workload placement decisions on economic grounds rather than a one-size-fits-all rush to the cloud.
Jon Toor
CMO, Cloudian

HYBRID AND MULTI-CLOUD REQUIRES HORIZONTAL APPROACH

Horizontal investments across organizations must become a priority for a successful transition to cloud-based infrastructures. When investing in new IT infrastructures, IT leaders typically build up their modernization programs "vertically" within each department. However, this creates a gap between teams, as each is operating in separate models and functionalities — driving up unnecessary costs and inefficient business practices. Looking towards 2022, IT leaders will be focused on successfully aligning their hybrid and multi-cloud initiatives for increased operational efficiency. In doing so, more must lean towards a "horizontal" approach, uprooting traditional processes across all departments, and deploying cloud-native tools on a wider organizational scale to reduce time and stress.
Peter Sprygada
VP of Product Management, Itential

CLOUD MANAGEMENT TEAM

In 2022, organizations will evaluate the implications of their cloud investments and will need to revisit best practices for engaging with the cloud. One trend we expect to see is businesses putting in place a team to manage cloud costs. This may be in the form of an individual from the IT/cloud/DevOps team, and in some cases, a dedicated team will be formed to focus on it. When the team or individual is put in place will be determined by the velocity of cloud initiatives, architectures, and overall budget for the project.
Leon Adato
Head Geek, SolarWinds

CENTRAL MANAGEMENT OF THE EDGE

Managing thousands of edge sites, deploying applications, troubleshooting, and upgrading are complex operations, requiring multiple products and integration services that make edge clouds prohibitively expensive and difficult. There will be a trend towards the simplified central management of edge sites in 2022, with more and more companies implementing a single point of control and management in order to greatly reduce the cost and effort needed for edge infrastructure and application operations.
Roopak Parikh
CTO, Platform9

The Marriage of Cloud and Edge

While both edge and cloud computing have been the subject of prediction discussions for years, we can expect to see a marriage between the two technologies driving better decision-making and operational efficiency in 2022. Organizations will marry the real-time capabilities of edge with the limitless scale and endless storage in the cloud. Accelerated digital transformations have led to more distributed IT infrastructures, requiring further support at the edge, while the computing power of the cloud is needed to advance artificial intelligence and machine learning. Combining both cloud computing and edge computing enables organizations to more quickly adjust and execute strategies in response to market and competitive changes. Having real time data from the edge as well as the historical data from the cloud will enable more intelligent decision making and more seamless operations.
Tobi Knaup
Co-Founder and CEO, D2iQ

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2022 Cloud Predictions

As part of APMdigest's list of 2022 predictions, industry experts offer thoughtful and insightful predictions on how Cloud will evolve and impact business in 2022.

CLOUD SERVICES MOVE UP STACK

Public cloud will not only become even more dominant, but the sophistication of the services they provide will increase and move "up stack," focusing on end-user experience and out-of-the-box usability rather than previous primitives that required experts to knit raw components together. Think of more complete solutions rather than just a bag of tools.
Damon Edwards
Director of Product Marketing, PagerDuty

CLOUD PROVIDERS OFFER OPENTELEMETRY

Cloud providers will begin to integrate OpenTelemetry into their managed service offerings, giving developers the ability to easily understand, profile, and tune their cloud native applications. We'll see more performance tools start to integrate cloud spend as a useful annotation, bringing FinOps into the performance landscape.
Austin Parker
Principal Developer Advocate , Lightstep

CLOUD PROVIDERS DELIVER METRICS

Cloud providers will begin to not only show metrics and logs, but also suggest baselines and success metrics based on their growing insight into medians and averages across their customer bases. With a large percentage of modern organizations running on the same infrastructure — whether it be AWS or Google Cloud — there's a rapidly growing collection of data that can be leveraged to help companies learn from one another.
John Egan
CEO and Co-Founder, Kintaba

EMBRACING REDUNDANCY

Organizations will embrace redundancy to mitigate continuing outages: Massive web outages and regional disasters will continue to take both public cloud and private datacenters offline in 2022. To mitigate this threat, organizations will increasingly seek redundancy for mission critical apps by deploying in multiple public clouds and leveraging private clouds. The tools to run modern apps — such as Kubernetes and other container-based technologies — interchangeably in the cloud or on-prem are maturing rapidly, providing new options for optimizing workload placement to ensure availability.
Jon Toor
CMO, Cloudian

CLOUD BACKUP AND RECOVERY

Enterprises' mass shift to the cloud during the pandemic has also come at a time when escalating cybersecurity and climate crises are putting data at greater risk than ever before. As a result, there's an urgent need for businesses to prioritize effective cloud backup and disaster recovery in 2022. Too many downtime incidents have made headlines in the past year, with companies like Facebook losing tens of millions of dollars due to outages. Backup and DR are imperative for these companies to ensure application performance and uptime.
Faiz Khan
CEO, Wanclouds

MOVING BACK TO PRIVATE CLOUD

Tech Savvy Organizations Are Beginning to Repatriate from the Public Cloud — The public cloud is alive and well and is not going anywhere; in fact, I predict it will grow 10-20x over the next decade. However, large, tech-savvy organizations are becoming much more judicious in how they use the cloud and will increasingly repatriate from their "all in cloud" stance. We'll start to see this shift happening in 2022. In much the same way that enterprises have embraced open source software and have opted to do it themselves, tech-savvy companies are beginning to realize they can run their own private cloud better and just use the public cloud for specific use cases such as usage bursts. Bank of America is one significant example of how a company can use private cloud to lower its IT costs, and I expect more large organizations will explore similar private cloud uses.
Marco Palladino
CTO and Co-Founder, Kong

CREATING CLOUD-LIKE ENVIRONMENTS ON-PREM

Instead of migrating legacy apps to the cloud, organizations will create cloud-like environments on prem: Containers and cloud-native storage technologies have created new paths to building private cloud infrastructure. Now organizations can get the benefits of public cloud at less cost, with greater control, and with the option to extend infrastructure to the edge. Gartner projects that 75% of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed outside centralized data centers or the cloud by 2025, driving new requirements for data management and analytics at the edge. The private cloud will give organizations new options for deploying modern applications, allowing them to make workload placement decisions on economic grounds rather than a one-size-fits-all rush to the cloud.
Jon Toor
CMO, Cloudian

HYBRID AND MULTI-CLOUD REQUIRES HORIZONTAL APPROACH

Horizontal investments across organizations must become a priority for a successful transition to cloud-based infrastructures. When investing in new IT infrastructures, IT leaders typically build up their modernization programs "vertically" within each department. However, this creates a gap between teams, as each is operating in separate models and functionalities — driving up unnecessary costs and inefficient business practices. Looking towards 2022, IT leaders will be focused on successfully aligning their hybrid and multi-cloud initiatives for increased operational efficiency. In doing so, more must lean towards a "horizontal" approach, uprooting traditional processes across all departments, and deploying cloud-native tools on a wider organizational scale to reduce time and stress.
Peter Sprygada
VP of Product Management, Itential

CLOUD MANAGEMENT TEAM

In 2022, organizations will evaluate the implications of their cloud investments and will need to revisit best practices for engaging with the cloud. One trend we expect to see is businesses putting in place a team to manage cloud costs. This may be in the form of an individual from the IT/cloud/DevOps team, and in some cases, a dedicated team will be formed to focus on it. When the team or individual is put in place will be determined by the velocity of cloud initiatives, architectures, and overall budget for the project.
Leon Adato
Head Geek, SolarWinds

CENTRAL MANAGEMENT OF THE EDGE

Managing thousands of edge sites, deploying applications, troubleshooting, and upgrading are complex operations, requiring multiple products and integration services that make edge clouds prohibitively expensive and difficult. There will be a trend towards the simplified central management of edge sites in 2022, with more and more companies implementing a single point of control and management in order to greatly reduce the cost and effort needed for edge infrastructure and application operations.
Roopak Parikh
CTO, Platform9

The Marriage of Cloud and Edge

While both edge and cloud computing have been the subject of prediction discussions for years, we can expect to see a marriage between the two technologies driving better decision-making and operational efficiency in 2022. Organizations will marry the real-time capabilities of edge with the limitless scale and endless storage in the cloud. Accelerated digital transformations have led to more distributed IT infrastructures, requiring further support at the edge, while the computing power of the cloud is needed to advance artificial intelligence and machine learning. Combining both cloud computing and edge computing enables organizations to more quickly adjust and execute strategies in response to market and competitive changes. Having real time data from the edge as well as the historical data from the cloud will enable more intelligent decision making and more seamless operations.
Tobi Knaup
Co-Founder and CEO, D2iQ

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 ...

5 Takeaways from the Observability Forecast for Media and Entertainment

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 ...