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2025 Cloud and FinOps Predictions - Part 1

As part of APMdigest's 2025 Predictions Series, industry experts offer predictions on how Cloud, FinOps and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2025.
 

CLOUD: ESSENTIAL INFRASTRUCTURE

In 2025, the cloud will evolve into a core platform prioritizing simplicity, security, and compliance. By integrating AI-driven insights and automation, cloud environments will empower diverse teams — not just developers — to drive efficient, secure, and compliant workflows. This growth will solidify the cloud as essential infrastructure, supporting seamless digital operations and driving strategic business growth. 
Gab Menachem
VP ITOM, ServiceNow

AI DRIVES CLOUD UTILIZATION

AI will significantly increase cloud utilization in 2025. The latest advancements in AI hardware, which come at a premium, require the use of hundreds of GPUs for model training. In addition, the demand for these GPUs has led them to be sold out for the next 12 months. If organizations are looking to train their own model or operationalize it with inference, there may be no other choice than to purchase it as a service from a cloud provider. As an alternative, they can utilize existing models and managed services from the cloud providers to make the deployment and management of a model simpler. Regardless of the method, AI is cost prohibitive as a DIY venture. The power of the cloud will enable customers to use the AI services and tools at the scale and flexibility that they need. Purchasing it as a service allows more organizations to access the technology and innovate, benefiting us all.
Jason Bright
Product Marketing Manager at Hyland

AI-DRIVEN AUTOMATION

AI in the cloud moves from simply "spotting things" to actually "doing things." Beyond data crunching and spitting out insights, AI-driven automation that turns insights into actions, automatically optimizes cloud performance and spend, and reduces the insight to action gap becomes the new table stakes by the end of 2025. Agentic AI gains rapid adoption and is integrated into workflows to accelerate AI impact such that the industry begins seeing "near-realtime FinOps" for the first time. And AI begins playing a bigger role in spotting anomalies and making decisions at moments of truth at the edge as organizations continue finding ways to shift left.
Kyle Campos
Chief Technology & Product Officer at CloudBolt

HYBRID CLOUD

In 2025, we will see an even greater push toward diversified IT infrastructure. It's no longer about being all on-prem, all-cloud, or all-SaaS — companies are finding a need to balance across these platforms to drive efficiency and better manage costs. We've had enough time with these technologies to know what works where, and we're getting smarter about budgeting for them.
Chrystal Taylor
Evangelist, SolarWinds

AI DRIVES HYBRID CLOUD

Thanks to AI, Hybrid Cloud is Here to Stay: Only about two years ago, it was a very cloud-only environment with some companies ready to get rid of their data centers altogether. The reality is, many businesses still have over half their data living outside of the cloud, and it will likely stay there based on what makes the most sense for their use case (in high stakes environments such as healthcare, for example). Therefore, hybrid cloud strategies are alive and well, especially with the proliferation of AI. Organizations can maintain on-premises GPU infrastructure for consistent, high-priority workloads while using cloud GPUs for burst capacity. This avoids complete lock-in to cloud providers' premium GPU pricing and grants better control over total cost of ownership for expensive AI infrastructure.
Haseeb Budhani
Co-Founder and CEO, Rafay

MULTI-CLOUD

In 2025, enterprises that initially made big bets on a single cloud hyperscaler will begin to diversify by introducing secondary providers, adding competition, and unlocking capabilities their primary provider may not offer. While the major cloud players still dominate enterprise spend, there will be a noticeable shift toward multi-cloud strategies as businesses seek to complement their existing investments.
Steve Ellis
Division President, Cloud Business Unit, Amdocs

AI DRIVES MULTI-CLOUD

I expect, due to AI-focused development, we'll see engineering and IT teams increasingly using more than one public cloud solution (AWS, Azure, etc.). By adopting this type of multi-cloud approach as part of a DevOps strategy, you can train your distributed AI workloads and models across multiple environments. For instance, there could be a benefit to using Azure's computing power to train one AI model and AWS for another. Or you could keep your legacy cloud workloads on one public cloud and then your AI workloads on a separate public cloud. This approach enables development teams to tailor their cloud environment to the needs of each AI application.
Faiz Khan
CEO of Wanclouds

MULTI-CLOUD CHAOS

The Forecast Calls for Multi-cloud Chaos: By 2025, multi-cloud environments will become the "new normal," but with a twist — organizations will be navigating clouds with as much finesse as a game of Twister. A recent Gartner report found that by 2024, over 75% of midsize and large organizations will have adopted a multicloud or hybrid IT strategy, but managing these clouds will resemble herding digital cats.
Ravi Ithal
GVP and CTO, Proofpoint DSPM

ALTERNATIVE CLOUD PROVIDERS

AI - The Catalyst For The Alt-cloud: AI will become smarter and more dependable in the next year, but businesses will require agile, scalable, open, composable ecosystems to unlock its full potential – something Big Tech's cloud titans aren't capable of delivering. Enterprises will increasingly look to alternative cloud providers to supply the kind of infrastructure that supports the rapid deployment of new AI models without skyrocketing overheads. These open ecosystems will supplant the monolithic, rigid, and costly single-vendor paradigm that has disproportionately favored enterprises operating closer to the traditional tech heartlands, leveling the playing field for AI innovation across all regions of the world.
JJ Kardwell
CEO, Vultr

DISTRIBUTED CLOUD

Enterprises Rethink Cloud Choices Amid New Regulations: 
As businesses seek greater flexibility and control, 2025 will see a shift away from legacy cloud providers toward more adaptable, distributed cloud solutions. Cloud concentration risk, privacy laws and data management regulations will be the primary drivers. Distributed cloud will enable companies to move compute and data closer to users and improve performance while staying responsive to compliance needs as regulations evolve. The focus will be on finding cloud solutions that balance innovation with agility.
Ari Weil
VP of Product Marketing, Akamai

Go to: 2025 Cloud and FinOps Predictions - Part 2

Hot Topics

The Latest

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...

Today, organizations are generating and processing more data than ever before. From training AI models to running complex analytics, massive datasets have become the backbone of innovation. However, as businesses embrace the cloud for its scalability and flexibility, a new challenge arises: managing the soaring costs of storing and processing this data ...

2025 Cloud and FinOps Predictions - Part 1

As part of APMdigest's 2025 Predictions Series, industry experts offer predictions on how Cloud, FinOps and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2025.
 

CLOUD: ESSENTIAL INFRASTRUCTURE

In 2025, the cloud will evolve into a core platform prioritizing simplicity, security, and compliance. By integrating AI-driven insights and automation, cloud environments will empower diverse teams — not just developers — to drive efficient, secure, and compliant workflows. This growth will solidify the cloud as essential infrastructure, supporting seamless digital operations and driving strategic business growth. 
Gab Menachem
VP ITOM, ServiceNow

AI DRIVES CLOUD UTILIZATION

AI will significantly increase cloud utilization in 2025. The latest advancements in AI hardware, which come at a premium, require the use of hundreds of GPUs for model training. In addition, the demand for these GPUs has led them to be sold out for the next 12 months. If organizations are looking to train their own model or operationalize it with inference, there may be no other choice than to purchase it as a service from a cloud provider. As an alternative, they can utilize existing models and managed services from the cloud providers to make the deployment and management of a model simpler. Regardless of the method, AI is cost prohibitive as a DIY venture. The power of the cloud will enable customers to use the AI services and tools at the scale and flexibility that they need. Purchasing it as a service allows more organizations to access the technology and innovate, benefiting us all.
Jason Bright
Product Marketing Manager at Hyland

AI-DRIVEN AUTOMATION

AI in the cloud moves from simply "spotting things" to actually "doing things." Beyond data crunching and spitting out insights, AI-driven automation that turns insights into actions, automatically optimizes cloud performance and spend, and reduces the insight to action gap becomes the new table stakes by the end of 2025. Agentic AI gains rapid adoption and is integrated into workflows to accelerate AI impact such that the industry begins seeing "near-realtime FinOps" for the first time. And AI begins playing a bigger role in spotting anomalies and making decisions at moments of truth at the edge as organizations continue finding ways to shift left.
Kyle Campos
Chief Technology & Product Officer at CloudBolt

HYBRID CLOUD

In 2025, we will see an even greater push toward diversified IT infrastructure. It's no longer about being all on-prem, all-cloud, or all-SaaS — companies are finding a need to balance across these platforms to drive efficiency and better manage costs. We've had enough time with these technologies to know what works where, and we're getting smarter about budgeting for them.
Chrystal Taylor
Evangelist, SolarWinds

AI DRIVES HYBRID CLOUD

Thanks to AI, Hybrid Cloud is Here to Stay: Only about two years ago, it was a very cloud-only environment with some companies ready to get rid of their data centers altogether. The reality is, many businesses still have over half their data living outside of the cloud, and it will likely stay there based on what makes the most sense for their use case (in high stakes environments such as healthcare, for example). Therefore, hybrid cloud strategies are alive and well, especially with the proliferation of AI. Organizations can maintain on-premises GPU infrastructure for consistent, high-priority workloads while using cloud GPUs for burst capacity. This avoids complete lock-in to cloud providers' premium GPU pricing and grants better control over total cost of ownership for expensive AI infrastructure.
Haseeb Budhani
Co-Founder and CEO, Rafay

MULTI-CLOUD

In 2025, enterprises that initially made big bets on a single cloud hyperscaler will begin to diversify by introducing secondary providers, adding competition, and unlocking capabilities their primary provider may not offer. While the major cloud players still dominate enterprise spend, there will be a noticeable shift toward multi-cloud strategies as businesses seek to complement their existing investments.
Steve Ellis
Division President, Cloud Business Unit, Amdocs

AI DRIVES MULTI-CLOUD

I expect, due to AI-focused development, we'll see engineering and IT teams increasingly using more than one public cloud solution (AWS, Azure, etc.). By adopting this type of multi-cloud approach as part of a DevOps strategy, you can train your distributed AI workloads and models across multiple environments. For instance, there could be a benefit to using Azure's computing power to train one AI model and AWS for another. Or you could keep your legacy cloud workloads on one public cloud and then your AI workloads on a separate public cloud. This approach enables development teams to tailor their cloud environment to the needs of each AI application.
Faiz Khan
CEO of Wanclouds

MULTI-CLOUD CHAOS

The Forecast Calls for Multi-cloud Chaos: By 2025, multi-cloud environments will become the "new normal," but with a twist — organizations will be navigating clouds with as much finesse as a game of Twister. A recent Gartner report found that by 2024, over 75% of midsize and large organizations will have adopted a multicloud or hybrid IT strategy, but managing these clouds will resemble herding digital cats.
Ravi Ithal
GVP and CTO, Proofpoint DSPM

ALTERNATIVE CLOUD PROVIDERS

AI - The Catalyst For The Alt-cloud: AI will become smarter and more dependable in the next year, but businesses will require agile, scalable, open, composable ecosystems to unlock its full potential – something Big Tech's cloud titans aren't capable of delivering. Enterprises will increasingly look to alternative cloud providers to supply the kind of infrastructure that supports the rapid deployment of new AI models without skyrocketing overheads. These open ecosystems will supplant the monolithic, rigid, and costly single-vendor paradigm that has disproportionately favored enterprises operating closer to the traditional tech heartlands, leveling the playing field for AI innovation across all regions of the world.
JJ Kardwell
CEO, Vultr

DISTRIBUTED CLOUD

Enterprises Rethink Cloud Choices Amid New Regulations: 
As businesses seek greater flexibility and control, 2025 will see a shift away from legacy cloud providers toward more adaptable, distributed cloud solutions. Cloud concentration risk, privacy laws and data management regulations will be the primary drivers. Distributed cloud will enable companies to move compute and data closer to users and improve performance while staying responsive to compliance needs as regulations evolve. The focus will be on finding cloud solutions that balance innovation with agility.
Ari Weil
VP of Product Marketing, Akamai

Go to: 2025 Cloud and FinOps Predictions - Part 2

Hot Topics

The Latest

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...

Today, organizations are generating and processing more data than ever before. From training AI models to running complex analytics, massive datasets have become the backbone of innovation. However, as businesses embrace the cloud for its scalability and flexibility, a new challenge arises: managing the soaring costs of storing and processing this data ...