Gartner Says Four Trends Are Shaping the Future of Public Cloud

Sydney, 3 August 2021 — Gartner forecasts Australian spending on public cloud services to reach A$13.8 billion in 2021 and grow 23.4% to A$16.7 billion in 2022. By comparison, worldwide spending on public cloud services is forecast to reach US$396 billion in 2021 and grow 21.7% to reach US$482 billion in 2022. 

Four new trends are accelerating growth in the public cloud services market, according to Gartner: cloud ubiquity, regional cloud ecosystems, sustainability and automated programmable infrastructure. Gartner predicts that by 2026, global public cloud spending will exceed 45% of all enterprise IT spending, up from less than 17% in 2021.

Cloud is already a mainstream technology widely adopted by Australian organisations, but new developments will expand cloud offerings and present new opportunities, according to Michael Warrilow, VP analyst at Gartner.

“Multiple emerging technologies will enable Australia to overcome the tyranny of distance in coming years,” said Warrilow. “Distributed cloud and broadband low earth orbit satellite technology are just two examples that will unify Australians.”

The following trends will shape the future of public cloud offerings and capabilities.

Cloud Ubiquity

The cloud underpins most new technological disruptions, including composable business, and has proven itself during times of uncertainty with its resiliency, scalability, flexibility and speed. Hybrid, multicloud and edge environments are growing and setting the stage for new distributed cloud models. In addition, new wireless communications advances, such as 5G R16 and R17, will push cloud adoption to a new level of broader, deeper and ubiquitous usage. Use cases such as enhanced mobile banking experiences and healthcare transformation will also emerge.

Regional Cloud Ecosystems

Growing geopolitical regulatory fragmentation, protectionism and industry compliance are driving the creation of new regional and vertical cloud ecosystems and data services. Companies in the financial and public sectors are looking to reduce critical lock-in and single points of failure with their cloud providers outside of their country.

Regions not able to create or sustain their own platform ecosystems will have no choice but to leverage the platforms created in other regions and resort to legislation and regulation to maintain some level of control and sovereignty. Concerns among politicians, academia and tech providers in these regions are increasing. In Australia and across Asia, Chinese public cloud providers continue to expand their presence.  

“For the most part, in this increasingly complicated mix of cloud providers, Australian organisations will stick with the established global hyperscalers – coupled with selective use of local, value-added providers,” said Warrilow.

Sustainability and “Carbon-Intelligent” Cloud

Nearly half of the respondents in the 2021 Gartner CEO Survey believe climate change mitigation will have a significant impact on their business. Cloud providers are responding to this growing focus on sustainability by instituting more aggressive carbon-neutral corporate goals, which creates new challenges for infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders. 

“Australian organisations will push sustainable IT mandates on to their cloud service providers,” said Warrilow. “In five years, it will be a pre-requisite for every commercial relationship with a cloud provider in Australia.”

Automated Programmable Infrastructure

Gartner expects the broad adoption of fully managed and artificial intelligence (AI)-/machine-learning (ML)-enabled cloud services from hyperscale cloud providers. This will rapidly eliminate the operational burden of traditional infrastructure and operations roles in the public cloud.

“Infrastructure must become programmable and automated,” said Warrilow. “Modern IT infrastructure, whether deployed in the data centre, consumed in the public cloud, or both, requires less manual intervention and routine administration than its legacy equivalents.” 

Gartner clients can read more in the reports “Top Four Trends Are Shaping the Future of Public Cloud” and “Forecast: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2019-2025, 2Q21 Update.”

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