"There is no business strategy without a cloud strategy," said Gartner VP Milind Govekar, ahead of the analyst firm's November 2021 IT Symposium/Xpo. "The adoption and interest in public cloud continues unabated as organizations pursue a 'cloud first' policy for onboarding new workloads," Govekar added.  

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It's easier than ever for enterprises to take a multicloud approach, as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform all share customers. Here's a look at the issues, vendors and tools involved in the management of multiple clouds.

Gartner estimates that over 85% of organisations will embrace the cloud-first principle by 2025, with over 95% of new workloads being deployed on cloud-native platforms (up from 30% in 2021). Over the next few years, the analyst firm predicts that cloud revenue will exceed non-cloud revenue for 'relevant enterprise IT markets'. "Anything non-cloud will be considered legacy," Govekar noted. 

SEE: Having a single cloud provider is so last decade

What are the headwinds that are pushing these clouds across the landscape of business IT? In August, Gartner identified four trends that it forecast would propel spending on public cloud services to exceed$480 billion in 2022:  

Cloud ubiquity -"Hybrid, multicloud and edge environments are growing and setting the stage for new distributed cloud models"

Regional cloud ecosystems -Driven by "geopolitical regulatory fragmentation, protectionism and industry compliance"  

Sustainability and 'carbon-intelligent' cloud -"Cloud providers are responding to this growing focus on sustainability by instituting more aggressive carbon-neutral corporate goals" 

Cloud infrastructure and platform services (CIPS) providers' automated programmable infrastructure -"Gartner expects the broad adoption of fully managed and artificial intelligence (AI)-/machine-learning (ML)-enabled cloud services from hyperscale CIPS providers"

Gartner's forecast saw total spending on public cloud services growing 21.7% year on year to reach$482 billion in 2022. The fastest-growing sectors were infrastructure services (IaaS, 32.9% to$122bn), desktop as a service (DaaS, 30.4% to$2.7bn) and application infrastructure services (PaaS, 25.8% to$101bn). 

So, the cloud is growing and evolving on several fronts. In this article, following on from a mid-2021 look at the market, we'll examine some recent surveys and analyst research to flesh out the picture of where it's going next. 

IBM: Cloud's next leap 

IBM's Institute for Business Value, in collaboration with Oxford Economics, surveyed 7,164 C-suite executives from enterprises covering 29 industry sectors and 44 countries for its October 2021 report, Cloud's next leap: How to create transformational business value. The average revenue for the companies surveyed was$805m. 

The report's main aim was to examine the current state of cloud-powered digital transformation. To this end, the authors identified four "progressively more powerful" stages of cloud adoption: 

Cloud v1 -Buying infrastructure as a service, paying only for services actually consumed; 

Cloud v2 -Purchasing cloud services with a credit card swipe from hyperscale cloud providers; 

Cloud v3 -The current enterprise movement to cloud as the default model for application, compute, and networking infrastructure; 

Cloud v4