Cloud will be centerpiece of new digital experiences - Gartner

The ongoing pandemic and the surge in digital services are making cloud the centerpiece of new digital experiences, according to Gartner.

"There is no business strategy without a cloud strategy," says Milind Govekar, distinguished vice president at Gartner.

"The adoption and interest in public cloud continues unabated as organisations pursue a "cloud first" policy for onboarding new workloads."

"Cloud has enabled new digital experiences such as mobile payment systems where banks have invested in startups, energy companies using cloud to improve their customers' retail experiences or car companies launching new personalisation services for customer's safety and infotainment.

In 2022, global cloud revenue is estimated to total US$474 billion, up from US$408 billion in 2021. Over the next few years, Gartner analysts estimate cloud revenue will surpass non-cloud revenue for relevant enterprise IT markets.

Use of Cloud-Native Technologies Will Be Pervasive, not Just Popular 

Gartner analysts say that more than 85% of organisations will embrace a cloud-first principle by 2025 and will not be able to fully execute on their digital strategies without the use of cloud-native architectures and technologies.

"Adopting cloud-native platforms means that digital or product teams will use architectural principles and capabilities to take advantage of the inherent capabilities within the cloud environment," says Govekar.

"New workloads deployed in a cloud-native environment will be pervasive, not just popular and anything non-cloud will be considered legacy.

By 2025, Gartner estimates that over 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms, up from 30% in 2021.

As the operating model changes, the organisation will turn to a product-orientated operating model where the entire value stream of the business and IT will have to be aligned by products. This will create new roles and responsibilities, such as site reliability engineers, product managers or communities of practices.

Low-Code and No-Code Technologies Use Will Nearly Triple by 2025

Application development will shift to application assembly and integration. The applications will be assembled and composed by the teams that use them.

"The technological and organisational silos of application development, automation, integration and governance will become obsolete," says Govekar.

"This will drive the rise of low-code application platforms (LCAPs) and citizen development.

By 2025, 70% of new applications developed by organisations will use low-code or no-code technologies, up from less than 25% in 2020. The rise of low-code application platforms (LCAPs) is driving the increase of citizen development, and notably the function of business technologists who report outside of IT departments and create technology or analytics capabilities for internal or external business use.

Connect Everywhere with SASE

Cloud-delivered secure access service edge (SASE) presents the fastest growth opportunity in the networking and network security market. As most traffic from branches and edge computing locations will not go to an enterprise data center, CIOs and IT leaders will increasingly use SASE to secure the anywhere and anytime access needs from users and devices.

Gartner estimates that in 2022, end-user spending on SASE will total $6.8 billion, up from $4.8 billion in 2021. In addition, by 2025, more than 50% of organisations will have explicit strategies to adopt SASE, up from less than 5% in 2020.

"Instead of shipping all traffic to central security appliances, CIOs and IT leaders must bring security to the sessions, instead of bringing sessions to the security," says Govekar.