APMdigest is following up our list of 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions with predictions from industry experts about how the cloud will evolve in 2023.

REAL-TIME VISUALIZATION

More and more companies are shifting to the cloud, a trend that will continue into next year. Accordingly, the ability to quickly and accurately understand cloud environments will become even more critical in order for businesses to stay agile and profitable. Visual solutions that help companies manage their cloud environments effectively — meaning real-time visualization with dynamic, customizable views and automated diagramming — will come to play a bigger role as the cloud grows increasingly complex.
David Torgerson
VP of Infrastructure and IT, Lucid Software

UNIFIED PLATFORM-CENTRIC APPROACH

Cloud adoption is soaring. However, the maturity of Cloud COE to deliver outcomes with the fragmented tool chain is becoming a real-world challenge. A single, unified platform-centric approach to assess workload migration to SaaS and cloud (day 0), service brokering with multi-cloud (day 1), and setting up cloud operations with observability, incident response, FinOps, and security posture management will dictate the market in 2023.
Sree Subramaniam
Sr Dir, Inbound Product Mgmt, ITOM, ServiceNow

AUTOMATED CLOUD RESOURCE ALLOCATION

One area where we'll see automation make a real impact is cloud resource allocation. While we may not have previously trusted machines to allocate cloud resources, as this technology becomes exponentially more sophisticated and exact in 2023, we'll see digital native companies increasingly take the lead in adopting this technology. Machines are being trained to continuously adjust to changes automatically, calculating application needs in seconds and allocating cloud resources accordingly. This push to automation offloads the task of manually calculating usage, monitoring and tracking changes, and forecasting usage well in advance. It's also doing it with greater exactitude and at a scale of efficiency that can't be replicated by humans.
Omer Hamerman
Principal DevOps Engineer, Zesty

RIGHT-SIZING CLOUD INVESTMENTS

The migration to the cloud that accelerated during the pandemic will continue, but as time goes on it will start to look different. As organizations (that do not already do this) start to realize that "everything in the cloud all the time" is not the right approach, they will start to perform more detailed analysis of what services and applications should be where — public cloud, private cloud, on-premises, SaaS, etc. This analysis will focus on many different aspects that will vary from company to company, but some of the more common questions are likely to revolve around things like security, performance, accessibility, reliability and sensitivity to outages.
Josh Chessman
VP, Strategy & Innovation, Netreo

"Lift and Shift" STARTS TO SOUR

The promise of "lift and shift," will start to sour. A lot of companies moved to the cloud with the premise that costs would be cheaper. They engaged consulting companies or partners to help them lift their existing applications and move them to the cloud. But, doing the same exact thing from a different location doesn't always have the tangible benefits you had hoped. The future seems decidedly hybrid, but not in that applications will dynamically move from on-prem to cloud and back. Applications that are not cloud-native but that are still needed likely stay will where they are. New applications will be built with a specific hosting location in mind. And they will largely stay where they are. But the move to the cloud will have given these companies a taste of cloud operations, and that will be enough to trigger a general adoption of cloud-like workflows and interfaces in on-prem infrastructure.
Mike Bushong
VP, Cloud-ready Data Center, Juniper Networks

BALANCE BETWEEN CENTRALIZED AND DECENTRALIZED ACCESS TO CLOUD

The need to strike a balance between centralized (governed IT) and decentralized access to cloud (potentially unchecked velocity) will be a challenge organizations need to address in 2023. With cloud adoption continuing to grow, companies will need to come to terms with control vs. velocity, finding the right balance between developers' freedom to create in the cloud and IT/DevOps organizations' need to govern access to it for cost and security reasons. To do so, cloud automation and access strategies need to be properly managed and configured to support business needs while also being mindful of consumption and mounting costs.
Lior Koriat
CEO, Quali

AGE OF CLOUD NEUTRALITY

Cost optimization will be the #1 priority in an uncertain economic environment.
Given the current economic outlook, companies will focus on cost optimization and savings in 2023. Following multiple years of 30% to 50% growth in the major public clouds, we expect to see that slow as more companies look to optimize their workloads — and costs — next year. This will usher in an age of cloud neutrality — where the operating model and economics are on equal footing with physical location (public cloud). The growth was previously driven by optimizing for flexibility and elasticity, but the VC-funded wealth-transfer to the big three is over for now, and for predictable workloads, they will repatriate or introduce other clouds to create cost competitiveness.
Anand Babu Periasamy
Co-Founder and CEO, MinIO

INDUSTRY-SPECIFIC SOLUTIONS

The trend of industry-based solutions and the need to consolidate cloud vendors drives solutions which are industry specific and no longer best-of-breed. We have lived in a time where best-of-breed cloud solutions have won for a long time but we now have too many applications. At the same time the market continues to demand industry-specific solutions. We will see a consolidation of cloud vendors into solutions focused on industries.
Pat McQueen
Sr. VP of Customer Success and Services, Copado

CLOUD COST CONTROL

In the upcoming year, we will continue to see organizations move to the cloud, but there will be a shift in the reasoning behind these moves. Previously, the cloud was chosen due to digital transformation goals following the pandemic — ultimately it was the right platform for the circumstances. But now, moving to the cloud will be important for organizations as a way to save costs, and so equally important will be ensuring they are also educating themselves on cloud costs. There are costs companies should factor into the budget, like Infrastructure Outsourcing, before switching over to cloud systems and there will be a greater need in 2023 to double-down on cloud economic models as an essential step.
Rick Vanover
Senior Director Product Strategy, Veeam

Amid the COVID-fueled chaos, most IT professionals hastily adopted a public cloud strategy but now, many organizations are facing a myriad of cloud management challenges due to this nonstrategic approach. Even years after the onset of the pandemic, applications are still very siloed across cloud environments. We'll see a change in 2023 as leaders work to refine their multi-cloud approach with a keen focus on optimizing ongoing costs. With a sharp focus on the bottom line, cloud strategies must not only be time efficient, but investment efficient as well.
Patrick Doherty
Chief Revenue Officer, Flexential

Due to the circumstances, I expect that organizations will shift the focus of their IT infrastructure strategy from flexibility to cost control. In practice, this means that cloud migration is no longer a one way road. Most organizations will evaluate, if they get better value by running certain workloads on-premises or even shifting assets back from the cloud into their own environments. As a result, hybrid environments will stay as a norm.
Thomas Lippert
Director Product Management for Checkmk, tribe29

Cost and resource optimization is going to be key for 2023. Considering the potential economic uncertainty, most companies want to have detailed insights into its cloud spend and the ability to control the spend and optimize its resource utilization. Driven by the digital transformation over the last few years companies have adopted multiple clouds based on their individual business needs. As a result, most companies have very little insight about spend, the correlation with business applications and potential cost savings possibilities. As organizations start to drive towards cloud adoption maturity that is coupled with business pressure on reduced spend, the companies who have a proactive approach will have a significant upper hand in dealing with uncertainty.
Amit Rathi
VP of Engineering, Virtana