With any rapidly expanding technology like cloud, trends come and go. This year is no different, with new trends emerging as businesses learn (often from their own mistakes) what works best for them, while the cost of the underlying technology continues to decrease as cloud adoption skyrockets.

New heights for the hybrid cloud

Since industry-leading enterprises began adopting hybrid cloud solutions in 2022, we expect the trend to hit new heights in 2023. Here are the core elements of the hybrid cloud that explain why:

• Agility
The inherent agility of a hybrid cloud makes it ideal for these uncertain times. It allows for easily scalable storage to meet fluctuating demands and frees users of single-vendor lock-ins. It will also let IT run their sensitive workloads through an on-site cloud and their less crucial ones on a public cloud service if needed.

• Cost management
Budgets are tightening. But with the hybrid cloud agility, IT can run workloads in whichever environment – public or private – is most cost-effective.

• Scalability
To cope with demand spikes and troughs, capacity can easily be scaled up and down through the public cloud.

• Data sovereignty
Data sovereignty means that digital data is subject to the laws of the country in which it is processed. This means that it matters greatly where data is stored and where the cloud solution vendors are headquartered. Hybrid cloud ‘solves’ this as it lets you store sensitive data on-site while still benefiting from the flexibility of the public cloud for less sensitive processes. In other words, it can save the organisation from a whole host of legal issues.

Conclusion? The instability of the world is the apparent driving force behind the current need for flexible solutions that can be scaled easily – and that’s exactly what the hybrid cloud is. That is why it will continue to be a massive focus for CIOs in 2023.

The rise of multi-cloud environments

2023 will be for multi-cloud what 2022 was for the hybrid. The advantage of diversifying services across various cloud vendors is a tactic known as ‘the multi-cloud approach’ – and it offers numerous benefits in today’s socio-economic climate. Again, the more unstable the economy, the more organisations will lean into diversification and flexibility. Here are the functions of multi-cloud which explain why it’ll be trending this year.

• Flexibility
As we’ve learned by now, flexibility and customisation are strengths of the multi-cloud approach – and the most sought-after qualities in times of significant change. As there is no single cloud solution to match every need, at least not to a high standard, multi-cloud is an obvious trend for 2023.

• Proximity
With the workforce scattered, multi-cloud solves the issue of poor response time for cloud users located outside of ideal range. Regional cloud providers operating closer to where the users are can host specific workflows, letting organisations maintain availability and meet data law requirements.

• Shadow IT
Independently deployed hardware and software can grow to a point where they need more oversight. This is especially likely considering the rapid growth of IoT and digital solutions. When they do, shadow IT can just be aggregated into the existing network.

• Backup
Multi-cloud backup allows for a highly scalable backup for data, workflows, and systems in case your central cloud goes dark. A backup is essential as organisations face the energy crises and the highest-ever threat of cyber attacks.

• Infrastructure
A multi-cloud infrastructure enables easy porting to new platforms, safeguarding organisations from risky strategies such as committing to a single cloud platform like Google Cloud, AWS, and Microsoft Azure. Again, the trend is flexibility and diversification.

Conclusion? Well, the hybrid cloud and the multi-cloud have their own individual strengths, but the simple reason they’ll both be trends for 2023 (and stay trends for years to come) is their inherent flexibility.

Continued growth of cloud-native applications

Can you guess the reason cloud-native software is so popular these days? It starts with an F and ends with lexibility. Because cloud-native software is broken into smaller microservices running within containers, it can scale easily, be updated without downtime, and takes minimal computing resources to operate. Ipso facto, flexibility. Here are some of the other benefits that’ll see them trending this year.

• Efficiency
Cloud-native solutions benefit from functions such as DevOps and automation, better known as continuous delivery (CD). The advent of cloud-native is having a similar effect to that of the first modern factories when efficiency skyrocketed because manual labour was outsourced to robots and machines. Which is crucial now that budgets are tightening.

• Cost-effective
Again, budgets are shrinking. But the cloud-native approach means organisations don’t need to invest in and maintain expensive on-premises infrastructure, which in turn allows for better margins.

• Availability and resilience
The two opposites of today’s market. Cloud-native applications are far more available and resilient. They can stay online during updates and can scale up and down depending on demand.

Conclusion? We could’ve saved you a lot of reading time by simply saying, ‘cloud solutions will trend this year because they’re flexible, automatic, efficient, and scalable which fits perfectly with an unstable economy.’ But where’s the fun in that? Also, we hope it’s been valuable to peek behind the scenes and see why these three solutions are growing so fast – and why they’ll be top trends in 2023 and beyond.