The world's technology answer to the COVID-19 dilemma is centred on cloud computing. In this oddest of years, the biggest cloud services were remarkable commercial successes. As businesses around the world managed to keep the utilities on by having employees work from home, all of the major cloud providers saw significant revenue growth and continued to release innovations at a breakneck rate. On the other hand, the technology is also introducing a new concept called cloud nationalism to its ecosystem. At a time like this, let's look at other predictions that are expected to dominate in 2022.
Cloud services were a lifesaver in the tragic and tumultuous year that is finally drawing to a close, growing the business and our lifestyles from coming to a halt.
Everyone will continue to rely heavily on clouds (along with streaming, remote cooperation, sensor technologies, as well as other cloud-reliant new technologies) in 2022 and beyond to recover from a pandemic that is still ravaging us mercilessly. With one eye on COVID-19 developments and the other on their digitalization programmes, enterprise technical experts will modify their cloud plans.
In the past summer, public clouds have accelerated their rise as a result of the pandemic. Enterprise cloud investment, both public and private, climbed 34.4 per cent year over year, as per IDC, while non-cloud IT spending fell 8%.
Leading cloud infrastructure platforms, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, will consolidate their leadership in the cloud market and spread their influence across many segments of the economy in 2022. Though Google, Microsoft, and Alibaba will continue to shrink the distance, AWS will maintain its market leadership.
The growing popularity of public clouds has forced traditional business computing companies to shift their strategic emphasis to hybrid and multi-cloud computing in the last year. Enterprises' dependence on leading suppliers will become more uneasy in 2022. To avoid being trapped into a single provider, IT workers will seek out hybridization and multi-cloud technologies. According to Flexera, 93% of businesses have a multi-cloud approach and 87% have a hybrid cloud strategy, indicating that this is already a widely used strategy.
In the midst of this year's quick move to work-from-home agreements, SaaS vendors like Oracle, SAP, and Salesforce provided a critical platform for businesses to continue operating as usual despite the disruptions.
As long as remote work is a viable option, SaaS providers of all kinds will be positioned for explosive development. According to Gartner, SaaS will continue to be the leading cloud segment of the market by revenue in 2021, expanding to $117.7 billion by the end of the year. Nevertheless, enterprise clients' increasing reliance on cloud-native, bundled, and serverless cloud applications will propel PaaS-based services and applications to even greater heights.
The rapid movement of most economic sectors to remote labour has resulted in a surge in mobile devices, AI-powered automation, autonomous robotics, and industrial IoT (Internet of Things) platforms in the past year.
To meet the low latencies needed by these apps, cloud services will migrate a growing share of their operations to intelligent-edge systems by 2022. As per Frost & Sullivan, nearly 90% of industrial firms will utilise edge computing by this time this year or next. The desire for cloud-to-edge apps will soar as 5G is pushed out globally in the coming years. Edge-based, AI-driven analysis of smart sensor information and Tiny ML (machine learning) workloads will become more common.
The key 5G/edge/AI technologies that IBM/Red Hat, HP Enterprise, and Microsoft introduced in 2020 will see significant investment in the following year. Nvidia will use its acquisition of Arm to expand its portfolio of solutions for automating AI app deployment to cloud-to-edge and hybrid-cloud scenarios. This trend will also boost demand for software-defined large networks, which will help vendors like VMware, Linksys, Juniper, Arista, and others.
Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and other Big Tech companies have faced lawsuits, regulatory proceedings, and legislative demands to be disintegrated in the year just ended. In 2022, these and other leading cloud providers will suspend strategic partnerships, and that they've been accused of employing to stifle competition, in favour of building up and bragging about their open partner ecosystems. In partner-led corporate transactions, prominent cloud providers are increasingly positioning themselves as back-end fulfilment agents.
Here's another one cloud computing prediction, which has more to do with cloud professionals' daily life than with the cloud services market. As businesses retool their cloud management procedures, a rising number of augmented reality applications will be used to provide training and support to remote cloud technical workers.
Cloud enterprises and their clients, like other organisations, will need to ensure that their employees are safe, healthy, and productive in remote work settings. Amazon could only hope to meet its recently announced goal of training 29 million individuals globally to work in cloud computing if it uses innovative ways like augmented reality. Even in normal circumstances, Amazon would find training this many people in person unfeasible.
The cloud computing industry's largest problem in 2022, aside from keeping people safe, will be finding, training, and equipping enough talented personnel to support clients' digital transformation programmes.
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