APMdigest is following up the list of 2024 Application Performance Management Predictions with predictions from industry experts about how the cloud will evolve in 2024. Part 1 covers hybrid, multi-, public and private cloud.
AI-DRIVEN CLOUD OPERATIONS
In 2024, expect AI-driven cloud operations (AIOps) to be a hot topic for optimizing cloud computing costs, resource allocation, and threat detection. The use of AI for cloud operations will be center stage for organizations feeling the crunch of ongoing economic challenges and looking to do more with less. As cloud computing providers continue to push their data-hungry AI services into the mainstream, data privacy and sovereignty will also become a prominent trend in 2024 as organizations try to navigate the regulatory landscape. This trend will be amplified as data privacy regulations rapidly evolve to keep pace with innovation. President Biden's recent Executive Order on AI safety is a bellwether for 2024.
Drew Firment
VP of Enterprise Strategies, Pluralsight
AI DRIVES CLOUD ADOPTION
Organizations will embrace the cloud for its strategic advantages. Businesses will shift their focus from solely leveraging cloud migration for cost and time efficiencies to embracing its strategic advantages, especially within the growing AI sector. Many companies will lack the in-house resources to develop such technologies, so they will turn to AI-as-a-service on cloud platforms to leverage this powerful technology. At the same time, they will prioritize robust cloud security measures — such as encryption,, authentication, and disaster recovery — to confront the emerging sophisticated, AI-powered cyber threats.
Paul Lechner
VP of Product Management, Appfire
Hybrid Cloud Maturity
2024 will see the maturation of the hybrid cloud approach. It is not just regulated industries that are adopting it; organizations of all types are maintaining on-premises investments while also embracing the cloud. This flexible approach allows them to leverage the best of both worlds, as reinforced by findings in the recent 2023 Hybrid Cloud Survey. This survey reveals that two-thirds of respondents, 64%, have already implemented a hybrid approach, and 38% of all respondents intend to enhance their adoption of the hybrid cloud within the upcoming year. GenAI will accelerate cloud adoption and legacy workloads will need the ability to work with these new workloads in the cloud.
Kamal Srinivasan
SVP of Product and Program Management, Parallels (a sub-brand of Alludo)
In 2024, companies will be more discerning about what workloads they place where. Not everything benefits from being in a public cloud, and not everything should stay on-prem. Decisions will be more outcome-focused, weighing factors like cost, performance, data sovereignty, and regulatory requirements. The hybrid model, which leverages both on-prem and cloud resources based on workload requirements, will become an industry-standard approach. The hybrid and multi-cloud integration allows enterprises the opportunity to strategically place workloads where they fit best, be it on-premises or on different public clouds. It offers flexibility in terms of cost, performance, and security. This approach helps in avoiding vendor lock-in, optimizing costs, ensuring business continuity, and providing the flexibility to choose services based on their merits.
Tony Liau
VP of Product, Object First
HYBRID + MULTI-CLOUD
Multi-cloud adoption has accelerated in the past few years. In early 2023, a survey suggested that 98% of companies on the public cloud already have plans to switch to a multi-cloud infrastructure. At the same time, organizations have also been increasingly relying on hybrid cloud architecture for flexibility and cost-saving purposes in the hybrid work era. In the coming year, we will see an influx of companies opting for hybrid and multi-cloud strategies. The difference with the previous years is evident, as they will aim to seamlessly combine these two approaches. Companies will be enjoying the best of both worlds: the flexibility and scalability of multi-cloud architecture coupled with sovereignty and control over their data and applications offered by the hybrid cloud — in-country, across regions, or around the world.
Amitabh Sinha
CEO, Workspot
HYBRID CLOUD DEVELOPER CHALLENGE
As cloud costs continued to rise over the last year, we saw many organizations migrate back to hybrid cloud environments that include on-premise alongside the cloud. As a result, DevOps professionals are still trying to figure out how to take advantage of this combination, and those growing pains will likely continue next year. For development teams accustomed to dynamically producing and deploying in the cloud, it's a significant change to now need to wait for on-premise storage administrators to provision the infrastructure that is needed. It also brings the need to establish DevOps guidelines in 2024 to ensure applications are hybrid-compatible. That's vital because in order to secure the cost savings associated with hybrid environments, you need to be able to freely move applications across the cloud and on-premise to achieve optimal performance.
Faiz Khan
CEO, Wanclouds
CLOUD PORTABILITY
In 2024, cloud portability will be table stakes. As the cloud matures, teams are realizing that being locked into a specific provider reduces their choice and ability to evolve their architectures. Being able to build cloud applications that can be moved across providers and even leverage multiple providers at the same time will become the norm.
Elad Ben-Israel
CEO and Co-Founder, Wing Cloud
Cloud adoption in hybrid architecture deployments will continue to grow. This hybrid cloud adoption though will take a different format: only workloads that are lightweight and have a predictable spending pattern will grow in public clouds while workloads that are large and have an unpredictable spending pattern will be repatriated to private clouds. For successful hybrid cloud operational efficiencies, we will see workload portability being implemented more since the ability to move workloads between public and private clouds with minimum effort and cost will be essential.
Sameer Zaveri
Co-Founder and CRO, Datamotive
MULTI-CLOUD MANAGEMENT
Cloud ecosystems are on a trajectory of exponential growth in 2024, prompting the development of highly specialized monitoring tools. These tools are engineered to offer profound visibility into the intricate, cloud-native architectures that underpin modern applications. Expect to witness the emergence of innovative solutions tailored for multi-cloud management. This enables organizations to optimize both costs and performance across diverse cloud providers, ensuring an agile and cost-effective cloud strategy. This shift represents a pivotal milestone in the evolution of cloud technology, empowering businesses to leverage the potential of this dynamic computing paradigm fully.
Ram Mamidanna
SVP, Cigniti Technologies
CLOUD VENDOR CONSOLIDATION
IT teams are being squeezed by shrinking budgets and cloud environments that are growing endlessly with complexity. Ballooning cloud bills will no longer be ignored as IT practitioners begin their mission to consolidate vendors wherever possible. Amidst the chaos in the cloud, platforms that promote connectivity and observability will edge out their competitors, while clouds that hold data captive on their platforms will not survive.
John Engates
Field CTO, Cloudflare
Look for more companies to consolidate their cloud environments from three or more to one or two platforms in 2024. While there will be consolidation around the cloud, most organizations will continue to maintain a combination of public cloud and on-prem platforms, resulting in a hybrid environment.
Eyal Arazi
Cloud Security Manager, Radware
CLOUD FIRST
Technology will continue its rapid shift to the cloud in 2024, coupled with an explosion in edge computing. By bringing data closer to the user, there is less latency, and everything is faster. Cloud-first will be embraced by every industry as any final resistance will wither away. As a result, issues including capacity consumption, energy optimization, and utilization will be in the spotlight.
Rupert Colbourne
CTO, Orbus Software
PUBLIC CLOUD MARKET FRAGMENTATION
Competition in the public cloud market will intensify as customers prioritize value, workload migration decisions, and specialized cloud service providers. New entrants, driven by new dynamics and points of differentiation like AI, will enter the market, contributing to market specialization and fragmentation.
Andrew Moloney
Chief Strategy Officer, SoftIron
MOVING FROM PRIVATE TO PUBLIC CLOUD
Due to high performance, enhanced reliability, business agility and cost efficiency, companies and organizations of all sizes will continue to migrate from private clouds to public clouds, eliminating the need to invest in hardware and software to maintain the infrastructure and enabling allocation of resources to business development.
Agur Jõgi
CTO, Pipedrive
In the SMB space especially, public cloud adoption will continue to grow for several reasons including the shared responsibility model, where MSPs don't have to do as much work as private cloud and the education for IT professionals is increasing and they aren't viewed as unreachable to provision and manage. Additionally, Microsoft is putting a lot of marketing and resources into public cloud adoption and the flexibility and reliability of public cloud reduces risk for business and IT pros alike.
Will Ominsky
VP, MSP Sales, Nerdio
MOVING FROM PUBLIC TO PRIVATE CLOUD
The availability of cloud-native infrastructure will lead to a resurgence of private cloud adoption. Cloud Centers of Excellence (CCoEs) will, for the first time, be able to both compare and apply uniform policies between both public and private clouds. Open standards like FOCUS, the FinOps cost, and usage specification will help facilitate this shift.
Andrew Moloney
Chief Strategy Officer, SoftIron
After years of workload migration from data center infrastructure to the public cloud, I predict a shift in the way businesses utilize public cloud services, along with an increase in the use of private cloud environments. Enterprises are increasingly realizing that private clouds can provide a powerful tool to lower costs by removing cloud rental costs. While public cloud services are great for workloads that have unpredictable scaling needs, private clouds can be optimized better for high-scale steady state workloads. Cost-conscious enterprises deciding where to run their applications will need to revisit the rent-vs-buy economics of public and private cloud infrastructures … So, while public clouds have (rightly) been popular for over a decade, I see enterprises becoming more selective over which workloads they choose to migrate to public cloud, and showing a preference for private cloud options.
Karthik Ranganathan
CTO and Co-Founder, Yugabyte
Dedicated Cloud
Where in the past we had public cloud and then private cloud, in 2024, we'll see the emergence of dedicated cloud. At the highest level users/customers get the ease of a cloud user experience — which includes infrastructure as code, on-demand pay as you go, speed to deployment, self-service/team level adoption/IT dept avoidance, simple billing, etc., to support workloads that previously didn't work in the (public) cloud. It's a best of both worlds situation. Dedicated cloud would offer the performance, control, and cost of a private cloud/on-prem environment married to the automation and ease of use of the cloud. It isn't a fit for every data set or workload, but for the ones that don't work in a virtualized cloud environment — it's a game changer.
Steve Martinelli
Director of Developer Advocacy and Community, Equinix
BRING YOUR OWN CLOUD
Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) will emerge as a SaaS strategy for large enterprises. Over the next year, we will see increased adoption of Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) as large enterprises seek a more cost-effective and flexible approach. BYOC centers on a cloud application's control and data planes. SaaS vendors handle the control plane, which includes user management, configurations, and policies, while the data plane, where the work execution occurs, can be hosted by the enterprise itself. Large enterprises will ask for BYOC from their SaaS vendors to optimize spend, reduce the back-and-forth of data transfer, and have greater control over their cloud environments to address data sovereignty concerns. Many SaaS vendors may need help to provide BYOC, opening up opportunities for specialized vendors to solve this complex problem.
Chad Tindel
Field CTO and VP of Worldwide Solution Architecture, ngrok
