It is expected that global end-user spending on Public Cloud Services is expected to exceed $480 Billion by 2022. Gartner has identified four trends in cloud computing that are continuing to expand the span of cloud offerings and its capabilities, along with accelerating the growth across all segments in the public cloud services market. The four trends are:

• cloud ubiquity
• regional cloud ecosystems
• sustainability and carbon-intelligent cloud
• CIPS (cloud infrastructure and platform service) providers’ automated programmable infrastructure

As per Henrique Cecci, the senior research director of Gartner – “The economic, organizational and societal impact of the pandemic will continue to serve as a catalyst for digital innovation and adoption of cloud services. This is especially true for use cases such as collaboration, remote work, and new digital services to support a hybrid workforce.”

Trend #1 Cloud Ubiquity

Today, the cloud has handled most new technological disruptions, that includes composable business.
During the time of uncertainty in a pandemic, the cloud has proved itself with its speed, resiliency, scalability, and flexibility. Today the new models for distributed cloud computing are hybrid, multi-cloud, and edge computing which are growing and setting a new stage. In addition, new advanced wireless communications such as 5G R16 and R17, will push cloud adoption to a new level of deeper, broader, and ubiquitous usage. This will lead to merging use cases such as enhanced mobile banking experiences and healthcare transformation.

As a result, we will witness a rapid expansion of global cloud adoption. 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.

Trend #2 Regional Cloud Ecosystems

We are witnessing the creation of regional and vertical cloud ecosystems along with data services. This is a result of growing geopolitical regulatory fragmentation, industry compliance, and protectionism. Most of the companies in the financial and public sectors are opting to reduce vendor lock-in and single points of failure with their cloud providers outside of their country.

Regions that are not able to create or sustain their own platform ecosystems leverage the created platforms in other regions and resort to legislation and regulation to maintain some level of control and sovereignty.

Trend #3 Sustainability and “Carbon-Intelligent” Cloud

Climate change mitigation has become a significant cause of business impact. This is the belief of nearly half of the respondents in the 2021 Gartner CEO Survey. As a result, cloud providers are responding to this growing focus on sustainability by introducing more aggressive carbon-neutral corporate goals. This is a new challenge 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

Trend #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 hyper-scale 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.”