Cloud usage in all its forms continues to grow in importance. However, in 2022, despite the ease of use, there will be a greater focus on portability and connectivity, on reining in the cost of these elastic services, and on a rebalancing of cloud versus on-prem workloads. Here, IT leaders share their perspectives on where cloud services are headed and what can be expected to change in 2022.
From the impact of the Great Resignation to the possibility of a cloud vendor making its services available on another public cloud, find out what these leaders are thinking.
- Cloud-native apps go to the edge: With the help of the CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation], enterprises have made major progress in adopting cloud-native technologies in public, private and hybrid cloud environments. In 2022, enterprises will express growing interest in bringing cloud-native apps to the edge, which will benefit from improved portability and agility. However, for open source CNCF projects to work, they require broad standardization of both software and hardware. To support the transition of cloud-native apps to the edge, industry leaders in edge software (such as Red Hat and SUSE/Rancher Labs) and edge hardware (such as Intel and Nvidia) will ramp up efforts to achieve greater standardization. —Gary Ogasawara, CTO, Cloudian
- “The Great Resignation” and IT talent shortage will create a push to cloud adoption: We are in a time of “The Great Resignation” as we witness employees in all roles, across professions, in all types of organizations around the world leaving their jobs in droves. Continuing into 2022, this workforce trend means IT teams are feeling a talent shortage pinch, losing admins qualified to manage legacy platforms like Active Directory, and pros that were focused on Microsoft 365. With workforce shortage issues becoming increasingly acute, IT pros will turn to high-quality automated solutions and cloud platforms to make up for the loss of manpower as these tools require fewer IT pros to operate and manage. We expect to see a continuing rise in the adoption of hybrid and multi-cloud services in 2022, with the expectation from companies that they can integrate their data across these environments, as well as manage cloud spending and performance. —Bryan Patton, Principal Strategic Systems Consultant, Quest Software
- 2022 will see the first public cloud vendor make its services available on another public cloud: This will trigger an arms race to disaggregate the most valuable capabilities from the overall service—from analytics to databases and AI/ML frameworks such as natural language processing—but it won’t be AWS to break the seal since it has no incentive to do so. The net result will be good for customers as it will have the effect of accelerating the trend of commoditization of cloud infrastructure and will pressure economics across the board. —Anand Babu Periasamy, Co-Founder and CEO, MinIO
- Revisiting cloud investments and best practices in 2022: The pandemic pressured organizations to modernize and accelerate digital transformation efforts, resulting in increased investments in cloud computing. However, every organization has unique needs and business objectives—and many have learned the cloud isn’t the be-all and end-all to an organization’s success. In 2020, organizations wasted $17.6 billion on idle cloud resources and cloud overspending. In 2022, organizations will evaluate the implications of their cloud investments and will need to revisit best practices for engaging with the cloud. 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, SolarWinds
- On-prem storage will increase in importance: As data grows—both in size and importance—on-premise storage use will expand in parallel, growing into indispensable infrastructure for a variety of reasons including, security, performance, regulation, cost, and latency. On-premise storage will serve all of these critical needs, while the cold and warm storage move to cloud. And we will see continuous progress and innovation in the segment of on-prem computing and storage, as well as with innovation on the edge driven by the need for 5G base stations, autonomous driving, and its associated costs. It will be impossible to store all of this data in the cloud. —Hao Zhong, CEO and Co-Founder of ScaleFlux
- The marriage of cloud and edge computing: It’s no longer edge or cloud. Expect to see a stronger synergy between cloud and edge computing that will further real-time decision- aking and operational efficiency. —Tobi Kanup, CEO of D2iQ
- Hybrid (everything) is here to stay: Hybrid solutions are not about compromise between approaches, they are about combining their strengths. A hybrid car combines the torque of an electric motor with the ability of the combustion engine to maintain high speeds. As we emerge from the pandemic, hybrid work models that blend home with office will be the norm for many companies. In 2022, more business leaders will come to realize the advantages of hybrid models in cloud data and analytics. —Oliver Schabenberger, Chief Innovation Officer at SingleStore
- Multi-cloud infrastructures will become mainstream: With the near-universal acceptance of cloud computing as a core component of today’s IT infrastructures, companies will move away from considering only a single cloud for their cloud needs. Despite the added complexity of running different workloads in different clouds, a multi-cloud model will enable companies to choose cloud offerings that are best suited to their individual application environments, availability needs, and business requirements. Concerns about the ability to meet 99.99% SLAs in the cloud for business-critical applications will prompt companies to implement sophisticated application-aware high availability and disaster recovery solutions. —Cassius Rhue, VP, Customer Experience, SIOS Technology
- Hybrid cloud is a reality and a multi-cloud strategy is a no-brainer: We’ve already seen a hybrid-cloud strategy with multiple data centers and public cloud providers emerge as the standard for large enterprises as the operational toolset continues to evolve and simplify cloud migrations. In 2022, we will see organizations grow their digital footprint by embracing the hybrid and multi-cloud model to enjoy elasticity and agility in the cloud, while maintaining tight control of the data they own. Cloud vendors will keep innovating and competing with differentiated capabilities in network connectivity and physical infrastructure improvements because organizations wouldn’t want being locked in. —Haoyuan Li, Founder and CEO, Alluxio
- The value of multi-cloud will be challenged: Almost all enterprises are now embracing multi-cloud, but it remains a challenge for teams to intimately know AWS, GCP, and The skills gap makes doing multi-cloud 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 Yotascale
- A large-scale software supply chain attack will take down a major cloud computing service: As organizations add more third-party SaaS and IaaS providers to their technology stack, the impact of cyberattacks on centralized cloud services will have a broader impact. In 2022, we will see cybercriminals take advantage of misconfigured SaaS APIs to exploit private data at an unprecedented scale. This will lead to a large distribution of core software code becoming compromised and impacting thousands of organizations across the globe. —Josh Rickard, Security Solutions Architect, Swimlane