Verticalization, managed services and sustainability to drive cloud trends in 2023

No matter how reliable their sources, IT analysts’ technology adoption forecasts are fundamentally interpretive – opinions based on received data. This is particularly true when predicting deployment trends in tomorrow’s cloud market.

Predictive viewpoints from cloud service providers, meanwhile, are informed by direct interactions with client IT teams experienced in projecting their organizations’ technology needs.

“Predicting cloud requirements is now a core competency for IT strategists,” says Oscar Garcia, Global SVP of Strategy and Technology at NTT. Garcia’s role makes him well placed to cast perspective on cloud trends for 2023 – notably, upshifts in the areas of cloud verticalization, hyperscale edge computing, SaaS management and cloud sustainability.

First of these, the rise of cloud platforms pre-engineered for an industry or sector, reflects the continued adoption of multicloud in high-value organizations.

“When organizations want ‘horizontal’ clouds tailored for a business industry, reengineering is needed to prep the cloud for that industry’s requirements, such as foundational services and compliances,” Garcia explains. “This results in duplicated effort.”

Increasingly, organizations want clouds preconfigured for necessary compliances, says Garcia: “Clouds that come with sector-specific features don’t have to be set up from scratch each time, thus streamlining cloud onboarding. They save time and money, and have inbuilt continuity with a given industry’s standards.”

Hyperscale edge computing gains traction

Cloud trends are rarely attributable to one driving force. Take demand for managed hyperscale edge computing services, which Garcia tips for estimable growth.

“Across sectors, enterprises increasingly look to distribute their workloads,” Garcia reports. “This is resulting in a need for distributed compute and storage that bring instantaneous response times at the edge.”

Associated benefits include the reduction of data processed in centralized clouds. This avoids network latency and other operational overheads. It also improves data security by limiting its exposure across networks.

“Edge as a Service options make it possible to implement networks, operations and edge computing that deliver real-time automation and processing,” adds Garcia. “Unified operating models simplify operations and allow IT chiefs to focus on business imperatives.”

SaaS management services demand

The number of businesses that have outsourced the management of their applications is on an upward trend that will steepen through 2023.

“The need for SaaS management is the result of enterprises moving workloads to SaaS applications and the emergence of new complexities associated with this delivery model,” Garcia says. “SaaS solutions are precisely charged for. When cost leakage due to ineffectively managed SaaS solutions is revealed, it can come as a shock.”

Another reason why more organizations are outsourcing their top-level application monitoring and management is to free-up their IT expertise to focus on tech-enabled business initiatives, Garcia adds.

Measurable cloud sustainability

A desire for improved cloud sustainability will form another 2023 trend.

“While moving to cloud might not automatically make an organization’s IT greener, cloud can create conditions that make transformation possible,” says Garcia. “This means transforming IT to be more environmentally high-performing, but also transforming business through IT, using IT to drive positive change in the organization.”

NTT works toward delivering a “sustainability budget” that quantifies sustainability in the form of values rather than direct costs.

“When we propose operational right-sizing for altering CPU usage scale-out, or projected requirements for storage, or other compute parameters, we scale the budgetary expenditure of a potential change to a sustainability impact,” Garcia explains.

IT decision-makers may not always recognize sustainability metrics presented as quantitative methodology benchmarks, but they will respond to financial indicators, adds Garcia: “They can say, ‘well, this isn’t the least costly option, but it delivers the best sustainability outcome’. They can then apply a ROI value. So, if it’s 10 percent more expensive, say, that 10 percent will be an investment in improving their organization’s sustainability posture.”

How Multicloud as a Service can help

Even the best-run cloud environments can prove complex, and multiple clouds bring multiple complexities. A Business Impact Brief from 451 Research found this complexity is driving organizations to service providers to implement effective multicloud management.

No service provider is better qualified to meet this requirement than NTT. Their multicloud solutions address those complexities from infrastructure to edge. It’s still cloud as you know it, but simplified, more connected, and delivered as a managed service.

Discover how Multicloud as a Service from NTT can enable you to get more from your strategic cloud investments.