Top 10 Trends Transforming the Cloud, According to Forrester

and Recent reports The 10 trends published by Forrester stood out as shaping the continued evolution of the cloud as more organizations seek to harness its potential.

A key takeaway from this report was the theme of the need to accelerate cloud-native adoption and improve cloud strategies. According to the report, even companies that have already moved to the cloud a few years ago can find their previous implementation outdated and now acting as technical debt. As the vendor provides such resources for modernization, Forrester says that’s where cloud-native his platform comes in.

According to Forrester, the top cloud trends are:

• Hyperscalers meet customer demands for platform configurability.
• FinOps is forcing ITFM/TBM to adapt and modernize.
• The platform team drives cloud-native transformation.
• Geopolitical dynamics create local players and solutions.
• The cloud redefines the enterprise data center.
• Adopting Kubernetes promotes proactive governance, compliance, and resilience.
• Cloud-scale operational solutions are gaining momentum.
• Megavendors own the IT budgets of companies.
• The battle on the front line heats up.
• Industry-specific products are gaining traction.

Forrester Principal Analyst Lee Sustar and US Bank Head of Architecture Madhu Rao will host a session on cloud-native innovation. This week at Forrester’s Technology & Innovation North America conference, September 29 and 30 in Austin and online. (InformationWeek readers can register with the code FORRIW.) According to Sustar, his provider originally appeared as a cloud service that could map closely, save time, create constant efficiency, and provide scalability. was offering “It meant that people had to work on how to develop new applications, how to build on these infrastructures,” he says.

That helped hyperscalers come up with patterns for the platform, Sustar says. This ushered in the era of Platform-as-a-Service, after which the cloud he provider offered a finished or semi-finished platform with automation and the ability to tailor it to their needs. I understand what you are asking. “In some cases, you may want it to be 95 percent customizable,” Sustar says. It could be his CRM or HR applications, he says, or customers might want to create their own.

In those cases, they were looking for a platform with the core of the system they expected, Sustar says. “Some people want to do open source on their own, but it’s relatively rare,” he says.

Cloud providers, especially open source and Kubernetes, are meeting market demand for semi-finished platforms that are loosely standardized and commercialized, he says. “If it’s a standard issue, they want to see the value developed on top of it.”

Part of this is driven by competition among vendors to build infrastructure globally, Sustar said. This is a capital intensive endeavor. It brings new business, but it also comes with pressure to standardize and commercialize, he says. “They need to differentiate further up the stack, which means more application development and more specifically the industry cloud,” he says. “As a generalist, the cloud provider always has a last-mile problem. You can’t do everything for everyone.”

After offering core services, cloud providers decide which strategic industries a specialized platform will support when appropriate, Sustar said. This could be part of a particular industry ecosystem, such as financial services or manufacturing. Edge is part of the mix, he says. Because that last his mile is often what a retail store or branch his office needs.

mega bender sway

According to Sustar, the rise of mega-vendors, which refer to hyperscalers with concentrated scale and reach, has made organizations wary of over-reliance on mega-vendors. “So we’re seeing a shift to multicloud,” he says. This may be due to different workloads in some cases. It also reduces the risk of concentrating all his work on one vendor, Sustar said. “It’s not easy to move from one cloud to another, to say the least, but they’re willing to put up with it to get some flexibility.”

According to him, there is a desire to use a standard container for applications to provide certain kinds of abstraction, avoiding over-reliance on the underlying cloud platform and allowing autonomy. That can lead to tradeoffs, he says, and opportunities for faster innovation can be sidelined. “That’s the balance people are trying to achieve,” he says Sustar.

geopolitical dynamics

Concerns about data sovereignty over the past few years have become prominent, he says, whether the cloud’s geopolitical impact is in Europe or elsewhere. “Technology is increasingly embroiled in trade wars and geopolitical disputes, and we see movement,” he says. Supply chains have also diversified in response to the pandemic, which he says has contributed to national and regional cloud zone trends. “Some of the European players who are non-hyperscalers are positioning themselves to serve the needs of the European market,” he says. What’s more, it’s perfectly manageable. “

(InformationWeek is Forrester’s Technology & Innovation North America Conference, September 29 and 30 in Austin and online. Register with the code FORRIW. )

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