2022 Cloud Computing Predictions: What Vendors, Partners Have to Say
What’s on the horizon for cloud in the coming year? Check out this slideshow for thoughts from a range of experts.
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2020 marked the year that organizations scrambled to move to the cloud as COVID-19 forced people into remote work. IT departments, with the help of their channel partners, then spent the bulk of 2021 untangling the inadvertent messes created by the rush. In 2022, the storyline will evolve to making sure cloud workloads reside in the right places. A big question — will organizations stick with the multicloud approach? There’s a chance they might not.
“As organizations move further into their hybrid and multicloud journeys, their focus will shift toward determining which workloads go where. Early on in their cloud journeys, organizations often moved simple workloads to the cloud and now they are evaluating migrating more mission-critical, complex workloads as they embrace modernization. In the year ahead, they’ll need to take inventory of their IT environments to select which workloads and applications are best suited for the cloud, which should remain on-premises, and how to work with an ecosystem of partners to fill in any gaps.” —IBM Cloud
“Customers will select multiple cloud vendors to store and manage their data and workloads. … Hybrid cloud computing will be the predominate approach for managing corporate infrastructure. The hybrid cloud approach gives customers the flexibility of selecting when to move workloads to a public cloud and which workloads make most sense for private clouds.” —Clara Angotti, president at managed services provider Next Pathway
“Almost all enterprises are now embracing multicloud, but it remains a challenge for teams to intimately know AWS, GCP and Azure. The skills gap makes doing multicloud well unrealistic. To get the most benefit from a cloud, you need to go deeper and embed core services rather than building stuff generically. Businesses will need to evaluate whether the economics of investing in more than one cloud is critical to their long-term survival.” —Asim Razzaq, CEO of cloud cost management vendor Yotascale
For too long, enterprises have assumed that cloud providers deliver inherent, deep protections against breaches. That’s not the case. Now, as more organizations support remote workers, IT pros are understanding that they must install their own cybersecurity safeguards within their cloud environments — IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, CPaaS. They’ll need the expert help of their managed service providers, managed security service providers and other channel partners to do this effectively.
“Cloud breaches will become more common, with attackers compromising credentials to access essential data on public clouds.” —Boaz Gorodissky, CTO and co-founder of attack path management provider XM Cyber
“More security breaches will be detected from the cloud.” —Oracle Cloud
It’s not enough to know that cybersecurity problems will impact cloud deployments. Channel partners need to look ahead and keep shoring up those environments in 2022. Here, three vendors talk about some ways to do that.
“As businesses look to strengthen their security postures in response to the evolving threat landscape, for example, they may look for security tools leveraging AI/ML to perform tasks. Meanwhile, offerings from cloud service providers, like Amazon SageMaker or Google TensorFlow, will similarly see widespread growth by reducing the barrier to adoption and implementation.” —Sascha Giese, head geek at SolarWinds
“As cyberthreats grow, organizations are increasingly adopting a hybrid, multicloud approach to mitigate vendor-concentration risk. With data protection top of mind, enterprises will also prioritize security designed with one single point of control so they can gain access to a holistic view of threats and mitigate complexity in the year ahead. While enterprises plan for 2022, they must also remember to prepare for the even longer-term future. As quantum computing grows stronger and poses potential risks, such as the ability to quickly break encryption algorithms and access sensitive data, enterprises must look beyond near-term threats to 10, 15 and 20 years in the future.” —IBM Cloud
“Ten years ago, an organization’s IT portfolio was all in-house in a data center, but now applications and services are hosted almost entirely in the cloud. However, only a fraction of these cloud applications implement effective fraud detection, or offer observability into who and how these services are being utilized. This means organizations are largely on their own to optimize security so it’s becoming increasingly difficult for IT leaders to monitor security behaviors. Next year, CISOs will improve security monitoring by modeling user behavior of external cloud services with time series data. This will enable them to detect security events in a timely fashion across a very broad attack surface. This approach also takes a lot of manual work out of forensics and incident management workflows, resulting in more automated — and therefore more enhanced — defense measures.” — Peter Albert, CISO of InfluxData
Throughout 2021, more cloud vendors launched platforms for specific vertical markets. Salesforce, for example, lets channel partners target industries — retail, finance, health care, and so on — with tools that meet the requisite compliance requirements. Other providers, including Google Cloud and IBM Cloud, are offering similar resources and products. This niche approach to industries will continue. Read on for thoughts on the reasons why and what it means.
“Core cloud infrastructure is interchangeable, so [providers] will battle over industry clouds. The cloud achieved its original rapid adoption because it was so generic. Today, the hyperscalers’ core compute, network and storage services differ mainly by marketing, not functionality, for the everyday enterprise. That commoditization means lower revenue for cloud service providers, so in 2022, they will compete to provide industry-specific clouds with a special focus on highly regulated industries, such as banks. For cloud buyers, the differentiator will no longer be which hyperscaler has the most services, but which one delivers compliance while enabling application developers to do their jobs faster and better in their specific vertical.” — Lee Sustar, principal analyst and Lauren Nelson, vice president, research director, Forrester
“As organizations grapple with security and compliance — especially highly regulated industries such as the financial services sector and government agencies, for example — cloud adoption is evolving toward specialized clouds. As these industries strive to meet the demands of today’s digital-first customers and constituents, industry-specific platforms supported by partner ecosystems will be key to helping them balance innovation with stringent compliance protocols.” —IBM Cloud
“Enterprise customers are embracing multicloud, with alternative cloud providers making up a significant portion. This is prompting bigger cloud infrastructure players to ‘niche down’ and create different offerings in an attempt to give customers the illusion of a small business feel.” —Blair Lyon, vice president of cloud experience at Linode
Back in the day, the rationale for moving to cloud technologies revolved around cost. Organizations could shift expensive purchases from the often-scrutinized capital expenditures budget to the more justifiable operating expenses purse. This, combined with subscription licenses, allegedly would save the enterprise money. These days, most people understand that’s not true. However, not enough organizations pay attention to ways to optimize (not necessarily reduce) what they spend on cloud. That stands to change in 2022, in different aspects of the cloud ecosystem, and channel partners will play key roles in the effort.
“The balance of cost for storage and compute in the cloud versus on-premises has changed dramatically — so much so that cloud transformation projects in 2022 have the potential to look really expensive. As a result, resellers who want to keep their customers on the journey to the cloud will need to find new ways to make those projects look financially appealing. Building rationalization into their projects — for example, eliminating the ‘dark data’ that businesses are storing before transferring it to the cloud — will be critical to unlocking the finance approval needed to move forward.” — Mike Walkey, senior vice president of global channels and alliances at cost management vendor Veritas Technologies
“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 at SolarWinds
“There will be friction between cost accountability and modernization of infrastructure. While Kubernetes greatly simplifies the job of on-demand application scaling, it can also escalate costs without notice. As more teams develop and deliver applications with Kubernetes containers, the landscape quickly becomes crowded and fragmented, resulting in a big bill. To avoid the financial blackhole, organizations will need solutions for making visibility and cost control easier.” —Asim Razzaq, CEO of cloud cost management vendor Yotascale
“Cloud hyperscale providers, such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft, will expand their services to offer cloud management services. In part, this is because customers will embrace a hybrid cloud strategy (public and private cloud), and in the context of public clouds, they will have contracts with multiple cloud providers. Those cloud providers that offer the most compelling pricing model and robust service offerings will win in the long run.” —Clara Angotti, president at MSP Next Pathway
Sustainability — or “ESG” initiatives — are all the rage. That will continue into and throughout 2022 (and beyond). Climate change — and, frankly, the profitable “green” business projects and incentives stemming from it — is spurring organizations and cloud vendors alike to produce fewer carbon emissions.
“Sustainability will hit an inflection point as businesses prioritize ESG. More businesses will realize that digital infrastructure puts a strain on the environment and will start setting goals to reduce their carbon footprint. Mission-driven companies will work to get to carbon neutrality and others will experience increased pressure from shareholders to prioritize ESG to ensure ethical growth.” —Asim Razzaq, CEO of cloud cost management vendor Yotascale
“Sustainability will be a new battlefield for the big three cloud providers. The results from a recent CloudBolt Industry Insights report prove that IT leaders are all in on sustainability. Believe it or not, 79% of IT leaders said they would pay more money to do business with a vendor that incorporates sustainability into their business model. Over a quarter (27%) said they would pay 6-10% more, and 35% said they would pay 11-15% more. This means sustainability will be a new battlefield for the Big Three cloud providers, which is great for the planet and the market.” —Jeff Kukowski, CEO of hybrid cloud management platform vendor CloudBolt
Amazon Web Services reigns as the behemoth in the public cloud computing space worldwide. Chances are, that will not change any time soon. And AWS’ top two competitors — Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud — appear to understand that. So, they will continue crafting strategies that better differentiate them from their main rival — and from one another.
“Azure is expanding to become ‘Azure Anywhere,’ which allows Azure services to run across on-premises and non-Microsoft clouds and still be able to see and manage them in a unified, seamless way as if they are natively running in Azure. I expect major push and expansion in this area that will have a big impact. … Microsoft’s Industry Clouds, especially ‘Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability’ will have a big impact on how organizations and governments across the world can leverage technology to reach their energy efficiency and carbon neutral goals.” —Mahadeva Bisappa, principal architect at technology modernization firm SPR
“Google will position itself as the ‘easy button’ of public clouds. Of the Big Three cloud providers, Google is openly recognized as the third-place contender. However, GCP is still hungry and motivated to increase customer adoption. Rather than monetizing its existing customers by creating new products and services, Google has an acquisition strategy based on making its solutions easy to use and easily available. This will be an opportunity for Google to distinguish itself by being the ‘easy button’ cloud provider.” — Jeff Kukowski, CEO of CloudBolt
Amazon Web Services reigns as the behemoth in the public cloud computing space worldwide. Chances are, that will not change any time soon. And AWS’ top two competitors — Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud — appear to understand that. So, they will continue crafting strategies that better differentiate them from their main rival — and from one another.
“Azure is expanding to become ‘Azure Anywhere,’ which allows Azure services to run across on-premises and non-Microsoft clouds and still be able to see and manage them in a unified, seamless way as if they are natively running in Azure. I expect major push and expansion in this area that will have a big impact. … Microsoft’s Industry Clouds, especially ‘Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability’ will have a big impact on how organizations and governments across the world can leverage technology to reach their energy efficiency and carbon neutral goals.” —Mahadeva Bisappa, principal architect at technology modernization firm SPR
“Google will position itself as the ‘easy button’ of public clouds. Of the Big Three cloud providers, Google is openly recognized as the third-place contender. However, GCP is still hungry and motivated to increase customer adoption. Rather than monetizing its existing customers by creating new products and services, Google has an acquisition strategy based on making its solutions easy to use and easily available. This will be an opportunity for Google to distinguish itself by being the ‘easy button’ cloud provider.” — Jeff Kukowski, CEO of CloudBolt
Organizations’ rush to adopt more cloud computing amid pandemic conditions is, by now, old news. Yet the effects of that shift continue to ripple, and will for a long time. The coming year will mark just the start of some new evolutions in the cloud market.
2020, of course, was defined by COVID-19-fueled moves to the cloud. Organizations were forced to implement cloud computing so they could support remote work despite global lockdowns. This frantic shift led to many messy deployments and shadow IT that posed threats to security and privacy. (And hackers took great advantage as a result.)
2021 marked the year of cleanup — understanding which cloud applications and services resided within organizations, making sure they fit strategies and budgets, and tightening security measures. Throughout all that activity, channel partners remained pivotal even as they faced the same technology and staffing challenges as their customers.
Heading into 2022, SMBs, enterprises, government agencies, nonprofits and other entities will keep evaluating and implementing cloud computing. Indeed, Gartner predicts end-user spending on public cloud services alone will grow 21.7% to $482 billion next year. What’s different for 2022 is that executives and their channel partners will invest with more intent and expertise than perhaps they have so far. That’s because business leaders better understand the value of cloud computing, as well as its challenges. As such, they likely will make some changes to shore up spending, spend in the right areas and support company initiatives.
In the slideshow above, we examine a number of the trends expected to arise in 2022. And we share, alongside our own analysis, industry experts’ predictions for the coming year in cloud.
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