Top Trends Shaping the Future of Cloud in 2024

Cloud computing has come a long way from being just a simple storage solution or infrastructure as a service. It is now an integral aspect of modern enterprise IT architecture, with worldwide spending reaching $564 billion in 2023 and a forecasted growth of 20.4% in 2024. As enterprises navigate the complexities of Generative AI (Gen AI) adoption and application modernization, cloud will serve as a catalyst for innovation, agility, and cost efficiency. 

In 2024, we foresee enterprises leveraging multiple public clouds to bring enterprise efficiency and drive innovation. Below are the top 10 cloud trends for enterprise transformation.

 

Considering the risks and limitations of relying on a single cloud provider, enterprises will adopt Multi-Cloud and Polycloud strategies in 2024. Through these setups, executives can mitigate risks and negotiate favorable pricing and service-level agreements (SLAs).

The Multi-Cloud approach involves leveraging multiple cloud providers to run the same applications or workloads. This not only eliminates a Single Point of Failure but also optimizes costs, reduces risks, and ensures scalability and disaster recovery. The Polycloud approach, on the other hand, involves leveraging the deep service capabilities and diverse strengths of different cloud providers. This strategy involves utilizing specific providers for specific workloads, enabling enterprises to address requirements such as resiliency, reliability, compliance, and data residency regulations. 

Enterprises will continue to explore innovative ways to drive down cloud costs in 2024. Due to a lack of visibility, cloud governance, and accountability, businesses have been experiencing cloud sprawl and overspending, often in the millions. 

To create a cloud ecosystem that maximizes value, it’s crucial to implement stringent governance and optimization strategies such as tagging, right-sizing, and managing orphaned and idle resources. Automation is also key to ensuring efficient cloud operations, particularly in the provisioning, scaling, and de-provisioning of resources. We believe this will pivot the use of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud models to Serverless; and Edge Computing to AI-driven optimization tools. 

Enterprises are increasingly embracing Gen AI and AI to meet evolving market needs, and the cloud will drive the adoption of these transformative technologies in 2024. 

Cloud providers offer massive raw computing power, foundation models, model catalogs, vector databases, code completion services, and tools for ML model deployment, customization, and fine tuning. Several cloud platforms also offer Gen AI services like Amazon Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, and Vertex AI, making adoption more seamless. By providing an end-to-end platform stack, cloud enables developers to quickly build Gen AI applications and use cases. Several cloud platforms also offer services like Amazon Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, and Vertex AI, making its adoption more seamless.

Industry cloud offers a comprehensive service and data fabric, access to products in the marketplace, composable tools, and integrations specifically built for a domain such as financial services, telecom, or healthcare. Engineered to digitize and modernize operations, industry cloud plays a pivotal role in creating new revenue streams and ensuring regulatory compliance. 

These unique features and offerings give industry cloud an edge over traditional public cloud services. In 2024, enterprises will continue to adopt these sector-specific solutions to gain a competitive edge and meet unique needs.

 

Cloud computing will play a crucial role in driving innovation for Internet of Things (IoT) and Edge computing. While Edge reduces latency and enables near-real-time performance, the ability to store large datasets securely in the cloud helps enterprises ensure centralized management and scalability. Cloud also enables massive data processing, in-depth insights, learning models, and advanced infrastructure for AI and ML models. 

Leveraging the cloud makes for smarter and more innovative IoT applications. For example, there will be an increasing adoption of autonomous vehicles in 2024, as cloud facilitates more efficient analytics, mapping coordination, visibility, and decision-making processes. 

Enterprises will continue to focus on maturing their cloud security practices in 2024. This includes the implementation of Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) for infrastructure, network, and firewalls; Cloud Workloads Platform Protection (CWPP) for application workloads and data; and Cloud Native Application Platform Protection (CNAPP) for cloud-native application workloads. 

Enterprises will also adopt the Zero-Trust security model, which recommends securing and onboarding verified users and devices, regardless of their location. Additionally, there will be an increasing adoption of containerization, Kubernetes, and serverless technologies. Integrating security measures into DevOps processes, container image scanning, and infrastructure management will be crucial. 

Cloud service providers are shifting from IaaS/PaaS models to serverless services. The increasing adoption of serverless technology is poised to remove the operational and management overhead of building highly available, automatically scaling, agile systems, all while embracing a pay-as-you-go model. This shift will reduce operational inefficiencies and overhead, allowing enterprises to scale and optimize. Several examples of serverless applications include Redshift for data warehousing, AWS EventBridge for event buses, AWS Fargate for containers, ElasticSearch for Redis, Azure Serverless Storage, Azure Serverless SQL database, serverless Kubernetes, etc.

Cloud migration will remain a priority in 2024. Enterprises will pivot from re-hosting to re-platforming and re-architecture migration, adopting cloud-native functions for enhanced efficiency, data security, agility, and innovation. 

Mainframe migration aims to incrementally modernize Common Business Oriented Language (COBOL) applications as enterprises seek to reduce mainframe costs. This involves identifying alternatives to run COBOL applications in the cloud. Enterprises are exploring the option of rehosting mainframe COBOL to decrease costs. This approach is low risk and fast impacting. Additionally, there is a transformational effort underway to convert COBOL applications into Java applications built on a cloud-native foundation, resulting in maintainable Java code.

Cloud-native platforms will serve as the foundation for more than 95% of new digital workloads. AI, ML, Data Analytics, DevOps, and automation will enable enterprises to handle the unique demands of cloud-native workloads, including efficiently building and managing containers and Kubernetes architectures. 

GitOps adoption is also on the rise to create a standardized source of truth for managing infrastructure and applications as code. Alongside this, teams are adopting AI-driven security tools to automate building, testing, deployment, and orchestration.

There will be an increasing adoption of AIOps practices for cloud monitoring, observability, meeting SLAs, event de-duplication, correlation, auto-remediation and healing. AIOps will also enhance mature AI-driven runbooks to remediate and proactively address requests in the cloud. To optimize these processes further, AIOps will improve automation, platform provisioning, and IT operations with advanced monitoring and observability, ultimately making everything run more smoothly.

Cloud providers have released cloud-native AIOps like Azure AIOps to ingest data from Azure Monitor and Insights. AWS CloudWatch has introduced a few AIOps functionalities like anomaly detection and prediction. Depending on the current IT service management and monitoring implementation, enterprises will choose the right breed of AIOps platforms like Dynatrace, Datadog, or GAVS ZIF.

A CCOE will continue to play a crucial role in driving cloud strategy that’s aligned with business outcomes, cloud governance, and architecture. Its mission is to evangelize best practices in line with the Well-Architected framework (WAF) and cloud adoption framework (CAF) in areas such as security, cost optimization, resiliency, and more. 

Enterprises already immersed in cloud technology will continue to refine their cloud charter, invest in cloud training, and evolve cloud design and architecture. This trend is expected to intensify as both newly established cloud-native enterprises and those transitioning to the cloud recognize the importance of establishing a CCOE.

In the face of rapid technological advancements in cloud, AI, and 5G, enterprises are pressed to innovate and compete in the space. There’s an increasing need to develop innovative services and platforms, provide better customer experiences, and ensure scalability and agility while reducing risks. 

In a cloud enabled world, organizations should  leverage these transformative cloud shifts for success and drive digital innovation in 2024 and beyond.