Gartner: 4 Trends Shaping the Future of Public Cloud

Global End-User Spending on Public Cloud Services Expected to Exceed $480 Billion Next Year

Four new trends in cloud computing are continuing to expand the breadth of cloud offerings and capabilities, accelerating growth across all segments in the public cloud services market, according to Gartner, Inc. 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, organizational 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."

1. Cloud Ubiquity

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

"Organizations are advancing their timelines on digital business initiatives and moving rapidly to the cloud in an effort to modernize environments, improve system reliability, support hybrid work models and address other new realities compelled by the pandemic," said Brandon Medford, Senior Principal Analyst at Gartner.

2. Regional Cloud Ecosystems

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.

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. Concerns among politicians, academia and tech providers in these regions are increasing, leading to initiatives such as GAIA-X in European countries.

3. Sustainability and "Carbon-Intelligent" Cloud

Nearly half of the respondents in the 2021 Gartner CEO Survey believe climate change mitigation will have a significant impact on their business. Cloud providers are responding to this growing focus on sustainability by instituting more aggressive carbon-neutral corporate goals, which creates new challenges for infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders.

"New sustainability requirements will be mandated over the next few years and the choice of cloud services providers may hinge on the provider's 'green' initiatives," said Cecci.

4. CIPS Providers' Automated Programmable Infrastructure

Gartner expects the broad adoption of fully managed and artificial intelligence (AI)-/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.

"Infrastructure is becoming programmable, and its operation is subsequently becoming automated," said Cecci. "Modern IT infrastructure, whether deployed in the data center or consumed in the public cloud, requires less manual intervention and routine administration than its legacy equivalents."

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Gartner: 4 Trends Shaping the Future of Public Cloud

Global End-User Spending on Public Cloud Services Expected to Exceed $480 Billion Next Year

Four new trends in cloud computing are continuing to expand the breadth of cloud offerings and capabilities, accelerating growth across all segments in the public cloud services market, according to Gartner, Inc. 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, organizational 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."

1. Cloud Ubiquity

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

"Organizations are advancing their timelines on digital business initiatives and moving rapidly to the cloud in an effort to modernize environments, improve system reliability, support hybrid work models and address other new realities compelled by the pandemic," said Brandon Medford, Senior Principal Analyst at Gartner.

2. Regional Cloud Ecosystems

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.

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. Concerns among politicians, academia and tech providers in these regions are increasing, leading to initiatives such as GAIA-X in European countries.

3. Sustainability and "Carbon-Intelligent" Cloud

Nearly half of the respondents in the 2021 Gartner CEO Survey believe climate change mitigation will have a significant impact on their business. Cloud providers are responding to this growing focus on sustainability by instituting more aggressive carbon-neutral corporate goals, which creates new challenges for infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders.

"New sustainability requirements will be mandated over the next few years and the choice of cloud services providers may hinge on the provider's 'green' initiatives," said Cecci.

4. CIPS Providers' Automated Programmable Infrastructure

Gartner expects the broad adoption of fully managed and artificial intelligence (AI)-/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.

"Infrastructure is becoming programmable, and its operation is subsequently becoming automated," said Cecci. "Modern IT infrastructure, whether deployed in the data center or consumed in the public cloud, requires less manual intervention and routine administration than its legacy equivalents."

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Most Enterprises Think They Can Switch AI Vendors in a Month ... Most Who've Tried Couldn't

I was on a customer call last fall when an enterprise architect said something I haven't been able to shake. Her team had just spent four months trying to swap one AI vendor for another. The original plan said three weeks. "We didn't switch vendors," she told me. "We rebuilt half our integrations and discovered what we'd actually been depending on." Most enterprise leaders don't expect that to be the experience ...

Your Observability Stack Has a Telemetry Pipeline Problem

Ask any senior SRE or platform engineer what keeps them up at night, and the answer probably isn't the monitoring tool — it's the data feeding it. The proliferation of APM, observability, and AIOps platforms has created a telemetry sprawl problem that most teams manage reactively rather than architect proactively. Metrics are going to one platform. Traces routed somewhere else. Logs duplicated across multiple backends because nobody wants to be caught without them when something breaks. Every redundant stream costs money ...

Operator to Orchestrator: 80% of IT Pros See Shift in Role as AI Permeates Workflows

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Many organizations describe AI as strategic, but they do not manage it strategically. When AI plans are disconnected from strategy, detached from organizational learning, and protected from serious assumptions testing, the problem is no longer technical immaturity; it is a failure of management discipline ... Executives too often tell organizations to "use AI" before they define what AI is supposed to change. The problem deepens in organizations where strategy isn't well articulated in the first place ...

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