Published on the 06/09/2023 | Written by Heather Wright

Cloud gets abstracted, intelligent and composable…

Forrester is urging local organisations to prepare for the future of cloud by conceiving their IT environment as their own cloud, not as a tenant of a cloud provider.

Lee Sustar, Forrester principal analyst, says the next decade will bring with it the intelligent composable cloud, with customers composing their own clouds for IT, operational technology, commercial and consumer cloud capabilities. 

It’s a move he says will provide organisations with tech stack flexibilty and the power to control exploding cloud budgets, regaining price power and flexibility to accomodate the next demands of applications.

“Of the three biggest changes in cloud that will impact business most, two are AI related.”

Multiple technologies, with Kubernetes at the helm, are converging to transform cloud, with the permeation of generative AI in cloud services, and the generalisation of Kubernetes-based cloud-native infrastructure initiating the abstracted, intelligent, composable cloud, Sustar says.

Sustar, who is the lead author of a new Forrester vision report, The Future of Cloud, told iStart that of the three biggest changes in cloud that will impact business most, two are AI related.

“First is AI in the cloud, in which customers seeking to train large language models will tap the resources of big cloud players like AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, IBM and Alibaba as well as new players such as Cohere,” he says.

The second is AI of the cloud, in which automation will simplify platform operations in many ways and enable organisations to ultimately compose their own clouds. AI will, he says, be used to make the cloud smarter, yet less complex.

And the third?

“The maturation of development and integration clouds that disintermediate the underlying cloud provider infrastructure from the customers,” Sustar says.

Examples of this include Salesforce Hyperforce, SAP RISE and Snowflake, he notes.

While tech-forward early cloud adopters are already harnessing composability, cobbling together vendor neutral Kubernetes-based platforms that can handle the big three hyperscalers as well as the platforms that run on top of them, such as SAPs Business Technology Platform or Salesforce Hyperforce, the curated corporate cloud environments are just the precursor to truly composable clouds.

“Enterprise organisations will move from piecemeal approaches to composed selections of cloud services to fit business needs into user-initiated, outcomes-focused solutions – all in their abstracted platform of choice,” Sustar says. 

“Generalised intelligence across cloud services will support composability based on use cases. Cloud and multicloud complexity will be more of a concern for procurement and vendor management than operators and developers, as services that once had to be stitched together across platforms are now available in prebuilt or semifinished offerings for users to shape according to their needs.”

A recent Forrester report, The State of Cloud in Australia and New Zealand 2023, found 94 percent of Australian enterprises say they’re currently using hybrid cloud, with 95 percent using multiple public clouds.

Sustar says companies are using common technologies such as Kubernetes to build new value across their hybrid reality.

Sixty-seven percent of Australian cloud decision makers said their organisation is adopting containers on bare-metal infrastructure, on-premises or in public cloud.

But while Forrester is clear the future of cloud is abstracted, intelligent and composable, it’s not an overnight play. 

The company says in the short term – one to two years – generative AI and foundational models will be built into new cloud services, with AI-everywhere services ‘drastically’ improving proactive operations and helping business operations and decisioning. 

Hyperscalers will differentiate through AI as they tackle industry use cases in the midterm, defined by Forrester as three to five years.

Then, within six to 10 years, major cloud providers will enable, integrate and manage a broad swath of IT, OT, commerce and consumer cloud services in curated experiences that feature multi-cloud services. Cloud will become synonymous with multicloud, and services across platforms will unite in pre-built platforms, with the much hyped, little seen metaverse existing atop cloud technology.

Forrester says this cloud age will see organisational silos give way to product-centric teams as highly automated platforms become accessible to both IT specialists and business users, and cloud-native platforms will continue to serve as the launch pad for new technologies, using industry platforms and ecosystems as a new accelerator.

Sustar is urging Australian and New Zealand organisations to start composing their own clouds now by moving workloads to the right cloud for the best performance, reasonable costs and product roadmap.

“Organisations preparing for the future of cloud should start by conceiving their IT environment as their own cloud, not as a tenant of a cloud provider. There may be multiple providers who come and go, and IT should be architected and implemented on that basis,” Sustar says.

Cloud efforts should be organised through a centre of excellence or cloud business office that involves stakeholders ranging from procurement and vendor management, to risk and audit, so they can engage with changes to the environment. 

“And third, focus on cloud cost management and FinOps at every stage when considering cloud providers or particular services and whether particular workloads are suitable for cloud.”

That tallies with the A/NZ report, which notes that the tech slowdown is making FinOps and operationalising of cloud top cloud priorities for local companies, with senior Australian enterprise cloud decision-makers reporting spending an average of nearly US$14 million on public cloud in past 12 months.