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Gartner: Top Trends Shaping the Future of Cloud

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact:

Trend 1: Cloud Dissatisfaction

Cloud adoption continues to grow, but not all implementations succeed. Gartner predicts 25% of organizations will have experienced significant dissatisfaction with their cloud adoption by 2028, due to unrealistic expectations, suboptimal implementation and/or uncontrolled costs.

To remain competitive, enterprises need a clear cloud strategy and effective execution. Gartner research indicates that those that have successfully addressed upfront strategic focus by 2029 will find their cloud dissatisfaction will decrease.

Trend 2: AI/ML Demand Increases

Demand for AI/ML is set to surge, with hyperscalers positioned at the core of this growth. They will drive a shift in how compute resources are allocated by embedding foundational capabilities into their IT infrastructure, facilitating partnerships with vendors and users, and leveraging real and synthetic data to train AI models. Gartner predicts 50% of cloud compute resources will be devoted to AI workloads by 2029, up from less than 10% today.

"This all points to a fivefold increase in AI-related cloud workloads by 2029," said Joe Rogus, Director, Advisory at Gartner. "Now is the time for organizations to assess whether their data centers and cloud strategies are ready to handle this surge in AI & ML demand. In many cases, they might need to bring AI to where the data is to support this growth."

Trend 3: Multicloud and Cross Cloud

Many organizations that have adopted multicloud architecture find connecting to and between providers a challenge. This lack of interoperability between environments can slow cloud adoption, with Gartner predicting more than 50% of organizations will not get the expected results from their multicloud implementations by 2029.

Gartner recommends identifying specific use cases and planning for distributed apps and data in the organization that could benefit from a cross-cloud deployment model. This enables workloads to operate collaboratively across different cloud platforms, as well as different on-premises and colocation facilities.

Trend 4: Industry Solutions

There is an upward trend toward industry-specific cloud platforms, with more vendors offering solutions that address vertical business outcomes and help scale digital initiatives. Over 50% of organizations will use industry cloud platforms to accelerate their business initiatives by 2029, according to Gartner.

Gartner recommends organizations approach industry cloud platforms as a strategic way to add new capabilities to their broader IT portfolio, rather than a total replacement. This allows organizations to avoid technical debt, drive innovation and business value.

Trend 5: Digital Sovereignty

AI adoption, tightening privacy regulations and geopolitical tensions are driving demand for sovereign cloud services. Organizations will be increasingly required to protect data, infrastructure and critical workloads from control by external jurisdictions and foreign government access. Gartner predicts over 50% of multinational organizations will have digital sovereign strategies by 2029, up from less than 10% today.

"As organizations proactively align their cloud strategies to address digital sovereignty requirements, there are already a wide range of offerings that will support them," said Rogus. "However, it's important they understand exactly what their requirements are, so they can select the right mix of solutions to safeguard their data and operational integrity."

Trend 6: Sustainability

Cloud providers and users are increasingly sharing responsibility for sustainable IT infrastructure. This is being driven by regulators, investors and public demand for greater alignment between technology investments and environmental goals. As AI workloads demand more energy, organizations are also under pressure to better understand, measure and manage the sustainability implications of emerging cloud technologies.

Gartner research shows the percentage of global organizations prioritizing sustainability as part of procurement will rise to over 50% by 2029. To deliver greater value from cloud investments, organizations must look beyond environmental impact alone and align their sustainability strategies with key business outcomes.

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Pilots are everywhere, stakeholders are seeking results, businesses are pushing for new tools, and IT teams are being asked to make AI secure, reliable, and useful at scale. But as organizations move from testing AI to operationalizing it, many are discovering that the biggest barrier is not the model, the use case, or even the budget. It is the file data foundation within ...

Fast or cheap? For most of my career in engineering, speed and quality sat on opposite ends of a seesaw. The "OR" in "fast or cheap" was non-negotiable. It was expected that pushing for faster releases meant that something in quality would give way. Tightening quality controls meant the schedule slipped. Every engineering leader I know has lived some version of that tradeoff ... The seesaw is starting to level out ...

I have been building enterprise software for more than 20 years ... One thing stays true across all of it: You do not find out your foundation is wrong during the crisis. You find out when the debt comes due. For a lot of organizations, that bill is arriving now. New research ... puts hard numbers on something practitioners have been sensing for a while. The telemetry problem isn't coming. It's already here ...

The rapid growth of AI workloads is pushing traditional log management approaches to their limits, according to The State of Log Management 2026 report from Dynatrace. Modern logs have become critical to understanding, validating, and securing AI-driven decisions, helping organizations ensure reliability, compliance, and performance at scale. However, the volume and complexity of AI telemetry are overwhelming legacy tools ...

For years, secure connectivity has relied on a familiar pattern: route traffic back to centralized gateways, inspect it, and then allow access. This model worked when applications lived in a handful of data centers and users were largely confined to offices. That model is now under strain. Applications are distributed across clouds, users connect from everywhere, and real-time workloads demand performance that centralized inspection points struggle to deliver. As traffic volumes grow and latency expectations shrink, routing everything through a small number of control points has become both a performance bottleneck and a resilience risk. The future of secure connectivity requires a different approach ...

The AI experimentation phase is over, and the private cloud is where enterprise AI workloads are being deployed for security and scale, according to Private Cloud Outlook 2026, a new report from Broadcom ... 2026 marks an acceleration into a full AI tipping point. The shift is being shaped by three forces — costs, complexity, and control — that public cloud environments are increasingly failing to address for production AI at scale. Key findings from the report include ...

44% of organizations have reported an outage in the past year tied to suppressed or ignored alerts, and 78% had at least one incident where no alert was fired at all ... Engineers learned about failures from customers. That gap between what our tools report and what our customers experience is the problem DevOps teams have been quietly solving with GenAI tooling, even as most enterprises continue to run their NOCs on manual alert triage ...

Cloud outages are usually described as technical failures. When a service goes down, a dependency breaks, or a region has issues, the focus immediately shifts to infrastructure. But if you look closely at how these incidents actually unfold, the root cause is rarely the technology itself. It is almost always tied to decisions made earlier, during design, implementation, or day-to-day operations. The system behaves the way it was built. The real question is how it was built ...

77% of leaders say their teams need AI skills urgently. 64% say their organization plans to train current employees rather than hire new ones. So far, so reasonable. The part that surprised me is who's been put in charge: 34% of those leaders say IT and engineering own the AI skills mandate. Learning and Development or HR own it at 7% of organizations. That's roughly five-to-one in favor of the people who understand the tools, over the people whose actual job is teaching adults how to learn new ones ...

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, enterprises are increasingly focused on enhancing their observability stacks to gain deeper insights into their IT environments. Observability has become a cornerstone of modern IT operations, enabling organizations to monitor, diagnose, and optimize their systems with unprecedented precision. However, a critical piece of the puzzle often goes unnoticed in this transformation: IBM i ...

Gartner: Top Trends Shaping the Future of Cloud

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact:

Trend 1: Cloud Dissatisfaction

Cloud adoption continues to grow, but not all implementations succeed. Gartner predicts 25% of organizations will have experienced significant dissatisfaction with their cloud adoption by 2028, due to unrealistic expectations, suboptimal implementation and/or uncontrolled costs.

To remain competitive, enterprises need a clear cloud strategy and effective execution. Gartner research indicates that those that have successfully addressed upfront strategic focus by 2029 will find their cloud dissatisfaction will decrease.

Trend 2: AI/ML Demand Increases

Demand for AI/ML is set to surge, with hyperscalers positioned at the core of this growth. They will drive a shift in how compute resources are allocated by embedding foundational capabilities into their IT infrastructure, facilitating partnerships with vendors and users, and leveraging real and synthetic data to train AI models. Gartner predicts 50% of cloud compute resources will be devoted to AI workloads by 2029, up from less than 10% today.

"This all points to a fivefold increase in AI-related cloud workloads by 2029," said Joe Rogus, Director, Advisory at Gartner. "Now is the time for organizations to assess whether their data centers and cloud strategies are ready to handle this surge in AI & ML demand. In many cases, they might need to bring AI to where the data is to support this growth."

Trend 3: Multicloud and Cross Cloud

Many organizations that have adopted multicloud architecture find connecting to and between providers a challenge. This lack of interoperability between environments can slow cloud adoption, with Gartner predicting more than 50% of organizations will not get the expected results from their multicloud implementations by 2029.

Gartner recommends identifying specific use cases and planning for distributed apps and data in the organization that could benefit from a cross-cloud deployment model. This enables workloads to operate collaboratively across different cloud platforms, as well as different on-premises and colocation facilities.

Trend 4: Industry Solutions

There is an upward trend toward industry-specific cloud platforms, with more vendors offering solutions that address vertical business outcomes and help scale digital initiatives. Over 50% of organizations will use industry cloud platforms to accelerate their business initiatives by 2029, according to Gartner.

Gartner recommends organizations approach industry cloud platforms as a strategic way to add new capabilities to their broader IT portfolio, rather than a total replacement. This allows organizations to avoid technical debt, drive innovation and business value.

Trend 5: Digital Sovereignty

AI adoption, tightening privacy regulations and geopolitical tensions are driving demand for sovereign cloud services. Organizations will be increasingly required to protect data, infrastructure and critical workloads from control by external jurisdictions and foreign government access. Gartner predicts over 50% of multinational organizations will have digital sovereign strategies by 2029, up from less than 10% today.

"As organizations proactively align their cloud strategies to address digital sovereignty requirements, there are already a wide range of offerings that will support them," said Rogus. "However, it's important they understand exactly what their requirements are, so they can select the right mix of solutions to safeguard their data and operational integrity."

Trend 6: Sustainability

Cloud providers and users are increasingly sharing responsibility for sustainable IT infrastructure. This is being driven by regulators, investors and public demand for greater alignment between technology investments and environmental goals. As AI workloads demand more energy, organizations are also under pressure to better understand, measure and manage the sustainability implications of emerging cloud technologies.

Gartner research shows the percentage of global organizations prioritizing sustainability as part of procurement will rise to over 50% by 2029. To deliver greater value from cloud investments, organizations must look beyond environmental impact alone and align their sustainability strategies with key business outcomes.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Pilots are everywhere, stakeholders are seeking results, businesses are pushing for new tools, and IT teams are being asked to make AI secure, reliable, and useful at scale. But as organizations move from testing AI to operationalizing it, many are discovering that the biggest barrier is not the model, the use case, or even the budget. It is the file data foundation within ...

Fast or cheap? For most of my career in engineering, speed and quality sat on opposite ends of a seesaw. The "OR" in "fast or cheap" was non-negotiable. It was expected that pushing for faster releases meant that something in quality would give way. Tightening quality controls meant the schedule slipped. Every engineering leader I know has lived some version of that tradeoff ... The seesaw is starting to level out ...

I have been building enterprise software for more than 20 years ... One thing stays true across all of it: You do not find out your foundation is wrong during the crisis. You find out when the debt comes due. For a lot of organizations, that bill is arriving now. New research ... puts hard numbers on something practitioners have been sensing for a while. The telemetry problem isn't coming. It's already here ...

The rapid growth of AI workloads is pushing traditional log management approaches to their limits, according to The State of Log Management 2026 report from Dynatrace. Modern logs have become critical to understanding, validating, and securing AI-driven decisions, helping organizations ensure reliability, compliance, and performance at scale. However, the volume and complexity of AI telemetry are overwhelming legacy tools ...

For years, secure connectivity has relied on a familiar pattern: route traffic back to centralized gateways, inspect it, and then allow access. This model worked when applications lived in a handful of data centers and users were largely confined to offices. That model is now under strain. Applications are distributed across clouds, users connect from everywhere, and real-time workloads demand performance that centralized inspection points struggle to deliver. As traffic volumes grow and latency expectations shrink, routing everything through a small number of control points has become both a performance bottleneck and a resilience risk. The future of secure connectivity requires a different approach ...

The AI experimentation phase is over, and the private cloud is where enterprise AI workloads are being deployed for security and scale, according to Private Cloud Outlook 2026, a new report from Broadcom ... 2026 marks an acceleration into a full AI tipping point. The shift is being shaped by three forces — costs, complexity, and control — that public cloud environments are increasingly failing to address for production AI at scale. Key findings from the report include ...

44% of organizations have reported an outage in the past year tied to suppressed or ignored alerts, and 78% had at least one incident where no alert was fired at all ... Engineers learned about failures from customers. That gap between what our tools report and what our customers experience is the problem DevOps teams have been quietly solving with GenAI tooling, even as most enterprises continue to run their NOCs on manual alert triage ...

Cloud outages are usually described as technical failures. When a service goes down, a dependency breaks, or a region has issues, the focus immediately shifts to infrastructure. But if you look closely at how these incidents actually unfold, the root cause is rarely the technology itself. It is almost always tied to decisions made earlier, during design, implementation, or day-to-day operations. The system behaves the way it was built. The real question is how it was built ...

77% of leaders say their teams need AI skills urgently. 64% say their organization plans to train current employees rather than hire new ones. So far, so reasonable. The part that surprised me is who's been put in charge: 34% of those leaders say IT and engineering own the AI skills mandate. Learning and Development or HR own it at 7% of organizations. That's roughly five-to-one in favor of the people who understand the tools, over the people whose actual job is teaching adults how to learn new ones ...

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, enterprises are increasingly focused on enhancing their observability stacks to gain deeper insights into their IT environments. Observability has become a cornerstone of modern IT operations, enabling organizations to monitor, diagnose, and optimize their systems with unprecedented precision. However, a critical piece of the puzzle often goes unnoticed in this transformation: IBM i ...