According to Gartner, the ongoing pandemic and the surge in digital services are making cloud the centrepiece of new digital experiences, which will lead to a further surge in revenue and investment.
Over the next few years, Gartner analysts estimate cloud revenue will surpass non-cloud revenue for relevant enterprise IT markets.
“There is no business strategy without a cloud strategy,” said Milind Govekar, distinguished vice-president at Gartner.
“The adoption and interest in public cloud continues unabated as organisations pursue a “cloud first” policy for onboarding new workloads.
“Cloud has enabled new digital experiences such as mobile payment systems where banks have invested in startups, energy companies using cloud to improve their customers’ retail experiences or car companies launching new personalisation services for customer’s safety and infotainment.”
During Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo EMEA, which has been taking place this week, analysts discussed how the cloud will become the pervasive style of computing in the near future.
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Pervasive use of cloud-native technologies
Cloud-native technologies in particular are expected among Gartner researchers to become pervasive, and not just popular, for organisations.
85% of organisations will embrace a cloud-first principle by 2025, according to the research body and consultancy, and will not be able to fully execute on their digital strategies without the use of cloud-native architectures and technologies.
Additionally, Gartner estimates that over 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms, up from 30% in 2021.
As the operating model changes, the organisation will turn to a product-orientated operating model where the entire value stream of the business and IT will have to be aligned by products.
This will create new roles and responsibilities, such as site reliability engineers, product managers or communities of practices.
“Adopting cloud-native platforms means that digital or product teams will use architectural principles and capabilities to take advantage of the inherent capabilities within the cloud environment,” said Govekar.
“New workloads deployed in a cloud-native environment will be pervasive, not just popular, and anything non-cloud will be considered legacy.”
Increased use of low-code and no-code
Low-code and no-code tech are also expected to see a rise in usage among companies, with application development set to shift to application assembly and integration, and applications being assembled and composed by the teams that use them.
By 2025, 70% of new applications developed by organisations are predicted to use low-code or no-code technologies, up from less than 25% in 2020.
The rise of low-code application platforms (LCAPs) is driving the increase of citizen development, and notably the function of business technologists who report outside of IT departments and create technology or analytics capabilities for internal or external business use.
Govekar added: “The technological and organisational silos of application development, automation, integration and governance will become obsolete.
“This will drive the rise of low-code application platforms (LCAPs) and citizen development.”
When low-code becomes high maintenance
SASE — a prominent growth opportunity
Elsewhere in the cloud space over the coming years, Gartner expects secure access service edge (SASE) to provide a prominent growth opportunity for organisations, with end-user spending on SASE precicted to total $6.8 billion in 2022, up from $4.8 billion in 2021.
As most traffic from branches and edge computing locations will not go to an enterprise data centre, CIOs and IT leaders are set to increasingly use SASE to secure the anywhere and anytime access needs from users and devices.
In addition, more than 50% of organisations will have explicit strategies to adopt SASE by 2025, up from less than 5% in 2020.
“Instead of shipping all traffic to central security appliances, CIOs and IT leaders must bring security to the sessions, instead of bringing sessions to the security,” said Govekar.
Security companies such as Kaspersky are already investing in SASE for the long-term, including acquiring network orchestration providers to bolster operations in this space.
