Cloud’s Crystal Ball: 3 Themes Emerge in 2025 Predictions

The cloud computing crystal ball was in overdrive this year. I took some time to dive into a bunch of the predictions for 2025 that hit my RSS feed. Amid all the soothsaying and prognosticating, I noticed a few dominant themes:

By far the number one prediction: the continued rise of hybrid and multicloud.        

Close behind: the shift to the edge.        

Underlying it all: persistent concerns around hyperscale concentration.        

Security made several appearances—no surprise, as it’s top of mind in every cloud study I’ve seen. AI permeated many of the predictions, though it didn’t claim center stage; I guess at this point it’s more of an expectation than a revelation. Cloud costs and cloud-native strategies also featured prominently this year.

Let’s take a look at some highlights:

Hybrid and Multicloud

In 2025, the changing face of the cloud will make it essential for companies to manage, deploy, and secure applications across a seamless continuum of compute environments – from hyperscale data centers to the edge. This evolution won’t just change where data is processed; it will demand a cohesive strategy that enables fluid operation across all environments, without sacrificing performance, security, or control.?By 2025, companies with the capability to manage this full range of infrastructure – from core to edge – will gain a distinct advantage, positioning themselves to deliver responsive, secure services in real time. This shift will make unified compute management across data centers, colocation sites, and edge environments a fundamental requirement for staying competitive in a distributed, data-driven world.? — Ari Weil , VP of product marketing, Akamai, Data Center Knowledge

“In 2025, the adoption of hybrid and multi-cloud environments will continue to accelerate, driven by organisations seeking to optimise costs and avoid vendor lock-in. As more providers embrace multi-cloud strategies, we will see significant growth in platforms offering a single pane of glass for platforms such as API management, firewalls, data, and Kubernetes. This move would reduce the overheads associated with managing multiple cloud environments. To support the drive for standardisation, Kubernetes will become the default hosting platform for many, ensuring software engineers have a consistent development experience, regardless of the cloud provider. Much of this shift will be driven by platform engineering, as organisations transform their DevOps teams into platform engineering teams that focus on the entire developer ecosystem. This transformation will enhance the efficiency and productivity of development processes across different cloud environments. -- Andrew Beal Andrew Beal, chief architect, Markerstudy, Tech Informed

Whilst the keyword may be ‘hybrid’, I expect to see a shift from hybrid environments by accident, towards hybrid by design – actively making decisions based on performance, cost, and indeed governance areas such as sovereignty. Cost management will continue to catalyze this trend, as illustrated by FinOps.?— GigaOm

After years of ping-ponging between cloud-first strategies, then cloud repatriation and back again, the survey says: hybrid cloud is here to stay for the foreseeable future. IT leaders have realized that a mix of on-premises, edge and cloud computing is a sensible, risk-averse strategy to satisfy the needs of different workloads and departments. Storage and cloud vendors will adapt to this reality while IT will need to get intelligence on their data assets so they can move data into the optimal storage over its lifecycle. Optimizing a hybrid cloud storage environment will be a moving target dependent upon real-time analytics on data types, growth and access patterns and the flexibility to move data to secondary or cloud storage tiers as needed. Storage professionals can amp up their career by adopting an analytics mindset in everything they do. — CloudTweaks

Shift to the Edge

By 2027, faced with the challenges of scaling GenAI inferencing, 80% of CIOs will rely on edge services from cloud providers to satisfy performance and data compliance requirements. — Dave McCarthy , Research vice president, IDC

“I’m keeping an eye on the potential expansion of edge computing, driven by the proliferation of 5G, which brings data processing closer to the source and reduces latency. This could help democratize AI. The question is, can we build efficient AI apps that run on mobile devices, possibly without relying on cloud resources??— Jerod Johnson , Sr. technology evangelist at CData, VentureBeat

Edge computing will become more popular as the need for real-time data processing increases. This technology lowers latency and boosts efficiency by processing data closer to its source. Our list of the leading trends in the cloud sector also includes edge computing. The phrase "edge computing" is self-explanatory: it moves processing and storage closer to the gadgets that generate information and the people who utilize it. Software programs are typically made to send and receive data from remote storage sites, like cloud infrastructure or on-premises servers. For increasing use cases, this type of computing and processing configuration may not be the ideal choice. — Dataquest

The growing demand for edge computing demands a tailored DevOps approach to the segment called DevEdgeOps. The approach brings the agility and automation of traditional DevOps to edge computing environments. By 2025, DevEdgeOps will enable businesses to manage edge infrastructure in how firms manage their central cloud for connectivity, security, and scalability. This will drive the rapid deployment of edge solutions and change how businesses interact with real-time data and utilize insights for superior decision-making. — Shriram Pore , Vice President Engineering - Infrastructure Engineering, MSys Technologies, ET CIO

With the proliferation of IoT devices and real-time applications, edge computing is set to transform industries by 2025. Critical computations will occur closer to data sources, drastically reducing latency for time-sensitive applications like autonomous vehicles and remote surgeries. This localized processing will not only enhance performance but also lower energy consumption by minimizing data transmission to central clouds, supporting sustainability goals. Furthermore, businesses will benefit from scalable and reliable connectivity, enabling seamless operations across distributed networks. — Jesintha Louis , CEO, G7 CR Technologies – A Noventiq Company, CXO Today

Hyperscale Concentration and Risk

In the wake of major vendor outages such as CrowdStrike, CIOs and regulators are both focusing on cloud concentration risk:?Truly business-critical applications need to be resilient against both regional and cloud-wide failures, which requires a fully distributed database architecture supporting seamless failover from one cloud region to another, even across clouds. Expect regulators to start scrutinizing cloud provider dependencies at the application level. -- Phillip Merrick Phillip Merrick, co-founder and CEO of pgEdge, Database Trends & Applications

Scalability and agility demands will push cloud-native analytics to the forefront: By 2025, cloud-native architectures will be the go-to choice for businesses looking to keep pace with the need for agility and scalability. As intelligence-supported decision-making takes center stage across industries, cloud-native analytics will lead the way. Companies are increasingly adopting multi-cloud strategies to maintain flexibility and avoid vendor lock-in, and analytics platforms will need to support seamless interoperability across different cloud providers. Users will look for hyperscale-neutral solutions that integrate effortlessly with major players like AWS, GCP, and Azure, while also handling AI/ML/Generative workloads with ease. Cloud-native is set to become the foundation for analytics in the next phase of business intelligence. -- Trevor Schulze , chief digital and information officer at Alteryx, Database Trends & Applications

Cloud resilience will be a top priority, Alves said, as CIOs advance their digital transformation initiatives and continue investing in hybrid cloud. "With the growing complexity of cybersecurity threats," he said, "operating in more than one cloud helps insulate a company from the concentrated risk of single provider." — Darrin Alves , CIO of global technology infrastructure at JPMorgan Chase & Co., TechTarget

The expanding need for distributed computing in 2025 will push the cloud industry toward a more open, flexible approach. As businesses embrace new architectures, they’ll move away from the rigid, single-cloud structures of the past. Instead of traditional “lift and shift” strategies, companies will adopt a more modular approach, selecting the best cloud environments for their unique workloads – be it public, private, or edge – fostering a multicloud environment by design.?This shift makes multicloud an unarguable necessity, driven not by redundancy alone but by the strategic deployment of workloads in the environments best suited to support them. With cloud native technologies like Kubernetes, companies can now manage these varied ecosystems more seamlessly, running applications in the locations that maximize performance, compliance, and responsiveness.? In 2025, organizations investing in open, multicloud architectures will gain the adaptability to meet customer demands at every level, whether in data centers or edge locations. This new era of cloud, built around choice, control, and flexibility, will be essential for enterprises seeking to operate at the speed and scale modern business requires.? — Ari Weil , VP of product marketing, Akamai, Data Center Knowledge

Did the soothsayers get it right? Or did they miss something big?