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2023 has seen a complex interplay of escalating geopolitical turmoil, adverse cyber physical events, customer and supply chain uncertainties and fluctuations, implosion of Generative AI with fruition of regulations and continuing focus on sustainability and ESG. In this BANI (Brittle Anxious Nonlinear Incomprehensive) and VUCA (Volatile Uncertain Complex Ambiguous) world with cost and human capital challenges, organisations are pivoting from simply jumping on technology bandwagons to now closely prioritising and evaluating specific use cases, and their impacts on their business and the extended organisation. The focus towards the end of 2023 is on comprehending, structuring and prioritising specific areas and use cases for leveraging technology in achieving business KPIs, improving decisioning, handling elasticity, while enhancing the total experience, as well as risk, compliance and resilience posture.

In early 2024, leaders are keeping a close watch on the JN.1 strain, the Russia-Ukraine and Middle Eastern situation, and ransomware and critical infrastructure attacks across states and companies worldwide, whilst analysing the ramifications of the EU AI Act and data privacy guidelines, as well as addressing skill gaps and fatigue in their IT and InfoSec teams.

2024 is expected to see more emphasis of Industry 5.0 tenets especially on human aspects. Going beyond improving experiences of customers, employees and supply chain, there is a growing focus on trust and explainability of technology, and optimising human utilisation and efforts across the extended enterprise.

Cloud Computing 2024 will continue to witness cloud computing and cloud native initiatives for IT modernisation. This year is also expected to see acceleration in leveraging the cloud for harnessing newer technologies especially Artificial Intelligence, as well as platform engineering and for meeting company green indices and sustainability goals. Cloud spending, which was skewed towards Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) right upto the early days of the pandemic will be moving towards an equitable distribution amongst SaaS, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Containerization and orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes and Docker, as well as applied Observability shall remain to be fundamental pillars across cloud initiatives. Besides enabling end-to-end Data Lifecycle, Data Ethics and Storage Management, companies of all sizes are leveraging cloud for deploying technologies such as Generative AI, Digital Twins, Intelligent Automation, Additive Manufacturing, Blockchain and IoT.

This report by Mordor Intelligence estimates the cloud computing market size, which is around USD 0.58 Trillion in 2023 to reach USD 1.24 Trillion by 2028, evincing a Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 16.40% during this forecast period. North America will remain the largest market with Asia Pacific being the fastest growing. BFSI, Telecom, Manufacturing and Healthcare segments are the leading verticals harnessing their cloud computing initiatives.

2024, will however see rising differentiators amidst increasingly homogenous cloud computing, both from public cloud service providers and customer perspectives. These encompass:

Serverless computing and Low Code No Code (LCNC): Cloud Service providers are incorporating serverless computing and LCNC components, tools and functionalities in their offerings. Serverless computing will be even more popular in 2024, especially on account of multi cloud computing, need for quicker development cycles, scalability, cost optimisation, and resilience. Thus, resulting in developers harnessing serverless computing frameworks, automation, administration, SLA management, upgrades, tuning and other capabilities of their cloud service providers.

Core Cloud native strategies along with the rise and popularity of Generative AI, will bring about renewed focus on LCNC tools and Citizen Development. LCNC functionalities such as Drag and drop, pre-built User Interfaces and templates, APIs and Integration Connectors, one-click delivery, flexible frameworks and others will bolster agility, speed, enhancements, scalability, integration, as well as simplification and reduction of IT dependence of cloudification projects.

CIOs are also working upon addressing challenges in serverless computing such as vendor lock-in, serverless cloud computing cost and security. Proliferation of LCNC platforms and tools have also necessitated corresponding regulatory and cybersecurity compliance considerations as well.

Edge and Fog Computing: Cloud computing is increasingly adopting edge and fog computing ecosystems, especially due to the popularity of 5G, mobility, IoT and Edge devices. This necessitates use of multi-access/ edge computing for real time data processing and decisioning, performance and latency KPIs, storage and privacy regulations, cost control and sustainability. Along with edge computing, companies are implementing decentralised distributed fog computing layers for filtering, prioritising and ensuring relevant dataset transmission back to the cloud.

Edge and Fog computing will increase in importance especially in regulated industries such as manufacturing, healthcare, oil and gas, agriculture, and others. Edge and Fog computing are also contributing immensely to FinOps, ESG and Green computing indices. Hyperscalers are incorporating a comprehensive portfolio of intelligent edge computing platforms in their offerings.

It is sacrosanct to mention that these rising attack surfaces also necessitate heightened cybersecurity and resilience postures.

Industry Cloud: BFSI, discrete manufacturing, retail and consumer products will continue to harness industry cloud capabilities viz. congregations of cloud applications, services and tools tailormade and optimised for the specific industry common use cases. Combining SaaS, PaaS and IaaS functionalities, Out-of-Box and easily configurable and customisable Workflows, Data management, APIs and other components, Industry Cloud improves ease, complexity and speed of deployment and reduces risk compared to cloud native and lift and shift approaches

Sustainability: The continuing focus on ESG and Sustainability throughout 2023 has seen companies expanding from using cloud computing as a means for sustainability, to now harnessing cloud computing and hyperscaler sustainability features for achieving their ESG indices. In 2024, it is expected that decisioning in cloud provider/ project selection shall also encompass factors such as low carbon emission regions, green data centres, and green and sustainable architecture, and incorporation of tools such as observability and intelligent automation.

This year shall see further developments by Public Cloud Services Providers in their net Zero/ Carbon free initiatives such as green data centre, sustainable supply chain, recycling and reusing, power optimisation and others.

Platform Engineering: 2024 is expected to see proliferation of Platform Engineering, especially on account of increasing cognitive load on developers with respect to frameworks and tools, and overstretched SREs (Site Reliability Engineers) who are in a perpetual firefighting mode. Platform Engineering with abstraction layers of tools and services infrastructure, is considered to be a logical evolution from DevOps and SREs and bridging the gap between developers and operations. Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) encompass tools, workflows, processes and other operational nuances of the end-to-end application life cycle in the cloud native ecosystem. This product ethos of IDPs and Platform Engineering teams hence enable self-service tooling for tasks, improve troubleshooting and incident resolution time, handle integration and automation, thus freeing up developers to concentrate on their core features and functionalities.

This Gartner research predicts that by 2026, 4/5th of large software engineering companies will establish core platform engineering teams that will be a fundamental tenet of the application delivery function.

Deploying Cloud principles to On-Premise/ Hybrid/ Co-locational Infrastructure: While companies grapple between hybrid and industry cloud, edge computing, and cloud repatriation, on-premise infrastructure is moving towards shared platform-based colocation providers, with as-a-service models. Hyperscale cloud providers and traditional hardware vendors are providing IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) platforms, which are based on Hybrid Cloud Management and Cloud Native principles. This, hence provides a unified interface with monitoring, control and visibility of all services, capabilities, updates, and tools across public clouds the edge, on premise data centres and co-locational spaces.

This ITaaS and cloud-based control approach also ensures transparent economic models corresponding to workloads/ services and helps FinOps initiatives. This Gartner research predicts that by 2027, more than 1/3rd of data center infrastructure will be managed from a cloud-based control plane. 2024 is expected to have Infrastructure and Operations teams build cloud native infrastructure and principles within their data centres, consider workload migration from inhouse facilities to edge or co-location nodes and adopt ITaaS models

Continued focus on FinOps: Companies shall be further working in 2024 to maximise return from the Cloud and bolster cloud economics. Besides the cross functional approach encompassing business, procurement, and finance teams besides DevSecOps, the levers in this section (viz. Serverless Computing, LCNC, Edge and Fog Computing, Cloud Repatriation, Sustainability, Observability, ITaaS, Orchestration, Automation and Platform Engineering) are essential tenets of FinOps.

2024 will see even more focussed efforts on cost optimisation through design, reserving instances, auto scaling, load and utilisation balancing, dashboards, monitoring and cloud management tools.

Cloud security: These predicted trends in cloud computing in 2024 and beyond will substantially increase the volume and breadth of potential attack surfaces, thus resulting in higher security issues, risks, points of breach and vulnerabilities. CIOs and CISOs shall continue to bolster their efforts in combatting Cloud misconfiguration, shadow IT vulnerabilities, insider leaks, 3rd party risks, ransomware, DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service), Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) and others. 2024 will also see heightened activities by Ransomware Gangs, Critical infrastructures attacks, Hack-tivism, espionage and state level cyber warfare.

In 2024, to improve cloud security, CIOs and CISOs shall be harnessing the power of Generative AI, Automation and Big Data powered solutions, besides their cybersecurity tools, processes, guidelines and frameworks. There is a steady rise of usage of AI, observability, automation and analytics powered Cloud Protection Tools such as Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) and Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP). These tools are augmented by Insider Risk Management aspects, Integrated Data Security Posture and Frameworks, Data Resilience and Human considerations including cyber drills, training, awareness and best practices.

The fundamental tenet is periodic and comprehensive cloud Cyber Risk Assessments, and the corresponding DevSecOps and Cloud Security policies across all environments, workloads and applications. The post pandemic thrust on Zero Trust principles, system and application configuration, data encryption, secrets management, observability, Identity and Access Management (IAM), Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), Role Based Access Control (RBAC), Password/ Password-less policies Cyber Security RASCI Charts and other best practices continues.

Cloud and Generative AI: Along with the developments in Generative AI models, algorithms, and players throughout all of 2023, cloud hyperscale providers are expected to enhance their Generative AI ecosystems and customer offerings throughout 2024. All cloud providers are incorporating the necessary infrastructure, architecture, and tools to enable their customers to harness the power of Generative AI for better business outcomes. They have been working on multi-modal capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs), AI chips, and other technologies to build platforms, general and industry specific offerings. A few big tech companies have also embedded Generative AI features into their end user computing applications and tools.

Travel, Media, Healthcare, Manufacturing and other verticals are expected to harness the Generative AI ecosystem of their hyperscalers to enhance customer, partner and supplier experiences.

Organisations shall also take forward their Intelligent Automation, Low Code No Code, FinOps and Cloud Economics and Cloud Security focussed initiatives to ensure best levels of customer, employee, partner and supply chain experiences, agility, responsiveness, resilience, compliance and competitiveness.

We will cover trends around Generative AI, sustainability and green IT, cybersecurity, supply chain and risk in the subsequent articles.

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Read more:
Edge and Fog Computing, Platform Engineering: IT trends that will gain prominence in 2024, ETCIO SEA - ETCIO South East Asia