2024 was a good year for hyperscalers and cloud providers who capitalized on their clients’ need for access to more processing and storage due to escalating growth in data volumes. The hyperscalers continued to expand their solution portfolios, creating in some cases almost unfathomably vast catalogues. While some businesses opt to repatriate some workloads to private or on-premise environments for cost and other reasons, the expectation is that Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) expansion will continue in 2025, with AI being a major factor in this expansion, according to a recent advisory report by GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.
GlobalData’s report titled “2025 Enterprise Predictions: Cloud Reconsidered,” reveals that cost-containment and new regulations will be important factors in enterprise cloud decision-making in 2025.
Amy Larsen DeCarlo, Principal Analyst, Enterprise Technology and Services at GlobalData, comments: “Even as economic uncertainty looms, the demand for more processing power and storage fueled in large part by work in GenAI and synthetic AI will keep the hyperscalers and other cloud providers in excellent position in the coming year. Another byproduct of the increase in AI-powered applications will be greater interest in edge computing. Hyperscalers and their partners will both benefit from this.”
Concerns about costs on the part of enterprise and public sector entities will be a major influence on cloud investments this year.
Larsen DeCarlo adds: “The onus is on cloud providers to deliver solutions that help organizations refine their cloud implementations, a fact of which they are keenly aware.
“Organizations will advance their FinOps work internally, engaging individual IT operations teams with lines of business and finance to improve operational results and reduce expenses. The hyperscalers who deliver effective tools to support this work will gain a point of differentiation.”
GlobalData notes that even as organizations invest more in cloud services, regulatory changes will drive them to re-examine their current implementations and make changes in what they deploy to public and private clouds.
Larsen DeCarlo concludes: “Hyperscalers have maintained a focus on developing vertically specific solutions for industries such as finance and healthcare. They will continue to build these out in 2025 while also expanding local infrastructure in regions including the Middle East and Africa as well as Asia.”
