5 Cloud Computing Trends for 2023 and Beyond

June 19, 2023

Blog

And the Numbers Prove It

Current cloud computing statistics indicate that:

• Fifty percent of corporate data resides in the cloud
• Public and private cloud services generate $178 billion annually
• Global spending on public cloud infrastructure is projected to reach $118 billion by 2025

With an almost wholesale adoption of cloud computing technologies across the business world, innovation is bound to thrive. Cloud computing trends capture these innovations and provide a clear picture of where the industry is headed.

Five Trends:

1. Cloud + Edge Computing

Cloud computing centralizes data and serves it across a wide range of applications. However, this model does not account for the sheer amount of data various endpoints are generating.

This data deluge has led to bandwidth and latency issues, making it challenging to build low-latency and ultra-low-latency applications like telesurgery. With 5G emerging and promising even more data generation from IoT, a new trend is emerging that solves part of this latency and bandwidth issue.

Edge computing moves computing functions away from a centralized data center and closer to endpoint devices. In the years to come, on-device computing will become a growing trend as application developers try to balance what data goes to the data center and what stays on the device. When combined with cloud computing infrastructure, edge computing will result in near-instant data transfers and near-real-time applications.

2. Commoditization of ML and AI

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are slowly moving from the theoretical realm to the realm of commercialization. 

At this shift’s nexus is cloud computing. AI and ML applications typically require massive amounts of computing resources, which the cloud readily provides. 

With the ability to provide almost limitless cloud infrastructure resources, cloud computing has created the path toward the commoditization of ML and AI.

Creative algorithms and language modeling are two AI/ML applications growing rapidly due to cloud computing advances. 

With both applications relying heavily on data, combining cloud computing capabilities and AI/ML technologies makes it easier to build commercialized applications for various use cases. 

For instance, today, tech companies are building language-understanding applications for call centers and using ML to provide internal employee support.

3. The Rise and Rise of Serverless Computing

At the heart of the cloud computing megatrend is serverless computing.

In the past, businesses would need to purchase servers (or server space) for applications. Cloud computing centralizes the server aspect of the computing environment, allowing application builders to create ‘serverless’ applications.

For application builders and businesses, this means paying only for computing resources, not the equipment or server management, removing computing limits and ensuring fewer server failures.

This trend toward serverless computing continues to accelerate. Gartner predicts that public cloud infrastructure spending could top $480 billion by 2022 and $1 trillion by 2027. Driving this trend will be more businesses ditching servers and opting for serverless computing.

For example, office productivity application Microsoft 365’s move to the cloud has resulted in massive adoption, with a staggering 145 million people using Teams daily, a far cry from the days of installing enterprise productivity applications on a local server.

4. Prioritization of Cloud Security

With greater adoption of cloud computing comes the inherent risk of hacks and other damaging cyberattacks. Considering that 79% of companies have experienced at least one cloud data breach, cloud security is now a significant factor when deploying cloud computing applications.

While these challenges might not affect smaller companies that rely exclusively on public clouds like Azure and AWS, enterprise corporations with private or hybrid cloud infrastructure have much to worry about.

These threats to cloud environments are a significant roadblock to cloud computing adoption by large organizations and might play an even more pivotal role in the impending explosion of IoT devices.

Two microtrends within this broader trend that are coming into play are:

• Cloud-based disaster recovery (Cloud DR): Businesses are focusing more of their DR strategies in the cloud due to the versatility and redundancy of cloud computing environments.
• Secure Access Service Edge (SASE): SASE combines wide area networking (WAN) and network security into a single, cloud-delivered service model. This hybrid model supports cloud-based applications, remote working environments, and access-everywhere requirements.

5. Hybrid Blockchain/Kubernetes Applications

The blockchain is undoubtedly one of the most exciting technological innovations of the last ten years. With unbreakable security and tremendous potential, the technology has been heralded as the heir to encryption and zero-trust networks.

However, one issue makes it challenging to roll out blockchain technologies across all applications: scalability. As more blocks are added, and more data is stored on a blockchain, processes slow down due to the need to verify and sign each transaction.

One trend that can solve this is containerization using Kubernetes. By containerizing data blocks and linking them, it is possible to deploy the blockchain at a big data scale, fulfilling its promise to revolutionize data security.

Supporting this coming together of the blockchain and Kubernetes is cloud computing, which provides the infrastructure needed to achieve this hybrid environment at scale. Expect more hybrid applications as application developers strive to bring the blockchain to the mainstream tech market.

Conclusion: Approaching Peak Cloud Computing Adoption

At the start of the cloud computing bull run, data centers were at the heart of all infrastructure and processes. Over the last five years, it has become apparent that a data-center-centric approach is not enough.

The five trends described above will take cloud computing to the next level, allowing application developers and networking specialists to sidestep some of the inherent challenges of cloud computing to unlock new value centers in the technology.

What is apparent is that we are nearing the peak of cloud computing adoption and should expect to start seeing more contextualized solutions that build on the core functionalities and benefits of the technology.