Cloud Computing Predictions for 2022 According to Forrester

Cloud Trends To Dominate the Market

The possibilities offered by the cloud and their significance to modern businesses across all sectors have been catching the public eye in recent years more than ever. The pandemic forced organisations worldwide to re-evaluate their business models and the technologies they use to support their operations. In the rapidly changing circumstances, the cloud’s scalability and flexibility allowed companies to accelerate their digital transformation or even introduce and test out innovative solutions.

Today, it’s impossible to imagine remote work or virtual management of business processes without cloud tools and services. However, as the world navigates towards the post-pandemic reality, businesses, yet again, start to look more closely at their current setups and models. This process will involve inspecting the possibilities or the need for redesigning their strategies and turning to features and tools that have just become available. Forrester has analysed the recent trends in cloud computing and formulated its own predictions for the cloud market in 2022.

Cloud-Native as the Core of Cloud Strategy

Forrester reports that in 2022, cloud-native adoption will rise to half of enterprise organisations. This is consistent with the previously observed trends of container adoption, which rose from 33% in 2020 to 42% in 2021. Cloud-native technologies permeate all major technology domains, such as Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, or the Internet of Things, and companies are now likely to alter their cloud strategies and put cloud-native at their centres. This view is shared by Gartner, which recognises cloud-native platforms as the answer to the increasing urgency to pursue digital initiatives faced by many enterprises. “By 2025, cloud-native platforms will serve as the foundation for more than 95% of new digital initiatives — up from less than 40% in 2021”, predicts the company in its report on strategic technology trends. In light of this forecast, Gartner recommends that IT leaders strive to reduce time-to-market by making cloud-native platforms the first choice for new application development. They should also modernise existing applications that can benefit from cloud-native attributes.

Global Scale With Cloud-Native Platforms

Cloud-native platforms offer developers the possibility to achieve global scale for workloads. Currently, even though cloud platforms may provide autoscaling of clusters and automated deployments, developers still need to consider where they will provision their workloads. If they want to go global, they have to plan how much infrastructure they will need. The situation is prognosed to change in 2022 thanks to a combination of a new generation of developer frameworks, platform-as-a-service, distributed data services, and edge computing. This, according to Forrester’s report on cloud computing trends, will give developers the chance to rapidly build and deploy efficient, cost-effective, planet-scale workloads.

Industry Cloud Expansion

Industry clouds combine cloud services and tools that used to be purchased separately and optimise them for the particular requirements of vertical industries. For organisations operating in sectors with many regulations or very specific needs, industry clouds create value by offering tailored support and technical capabilities. Microsoft Azure and AWS already offer industry cloud options, however, 2022 is predicted to bring an even bigger explosion of these services. Both Forrester and Gartner report that in 2022 industry cloud will be among the most important trends for cloud, and we can expect major cloud service providers to expand their vertical-specific cloud solutions. Leaders in this area will look for efficient ways to create industry clouds that are both modular and maintainable. Gartner also predicts that “by 2024, over 50% of the leading cloud providers will address vertical business use cases by deploying composable industry clouds”.

Shifts on the Global Cloud Market

The antitrust reform and data protection regulations were already impacting the cloud market in 2021, forcing major cloud providers to react and adjust their strategies to regional requirements. In 2022, the market leaders are expected to introduce further adjustments in order to comply with local regulations while still addressing the needs of their global customers. Forrester reports that in China the future of the cloud market will be in the hands of state-owned companies, while in Europe, we’ll witness the first reactions to GAIA-X policies. Gaia-X is an initiative aimed at developing a European federation of data infrastructure and service providers that will become efficient, secure, and trustworthy. Its framework provides a set of policies and rules that can be applied to any existing cloud platform for greater transparency, controllability and interoperability.

When it comes to the major players on the market, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) isn’t expected to outperform Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. This means GCP won’t fulfil its reported ambition of being one of the two top cloud providers by 2023. However, Forrester’s report finds that GCP has achieved advantages in several areas and made significant advancements in enterprise support and vertical solutions. Therefore, failing to reach its short-term goal won’t affect its overall, long-term success.

Conclusion

Enterprise cloud usage grew substantially during the pandemic, and now businesses worldwide are introducing new ways of utilising the cloud’s potential. This includes looking for optimisation possibilities, new levels of customisation, and additional scalability. The cloud market in 2022 will see cloud-native solutions as the core of many enterprises’ strategies, and the new capabilities will allow for easier global scaling. The need for more tailored solutions will result in the rise of industry clouds. According to this year’s cloud computing predictions, the major cloud providers will have to react and adjust to regional regulations to continue to serve their customers on a global scale. The predicted changes on the cloud market give IT leaders the chance to rethink and redesign their cloud strategies to leverage the full potential of the newly available features and capabilities, and maximise the value the cloud brings to their companies.