Consolidation of products, closer attention to security and cost increases -- cloud predictions for 2024

The cloud has become a familiar feature of most computing environments over the last decade, but that doesn't mean that the technology is standing still.

Here are some industry expert views on what we can expect from the cloud scene in 2024.

Matt Asay, vice president of developer relations at MongoDB, expects cloud to play a big role in the spread of AI. "Ironically, the dominant tech trend in 2024 won't be AI, but it will be the technology that enables AI: cloud. Even though 90 percent of IT spending is still related to on-premises deployment, there's a major shift happening with AI as most of its workloads run on the elastic infrastructure that cloud offers. The cloud is doing the heavy lifting by making it easier to manage data, infrastructure, and more, enabling organizations to implement AI in a productive and efficient manner. If quiet, that will be the biggest tech trend for 2024 and many years to come."

Bharti Patel, SVP, head of engineering at Hitachi Vantara says cloud will be recognized as a operational model. "In 2024, we will see a significant shift in the perception of cloud computing. Gone are the days when all public cloud is good; we will now be looking at cloud as an ecosystem. Cloud will no longer be a fixed location -- either on-prem or in the cloud -- it's an operating model that offers cloud principles like agility, self-service, cost-effectiveness, and scalability. This transformation from a location to an operational framework is becoming increasingly clear as more cloud providers begin to leverage solutions that bridge the gap between on-prem and cloud deployments."

Lightbend CEO and founder Jonas Bonér believes that the lines between cloud computing and edge computing will continue to blur. "2023 saw the mainstreaming of Edge Computing. It’s clear this architecture is here to stay and will only grow further in 2024. Particularly since AI-based applications will be increasingly pushed closer to the data to reduce latency. Combined with the continued growth of the cloud -- worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 20.4 percent to total $678.8 billion in 2024, up from $563.6 billion in 2023, according to the latest forecast from Gartner, Inc. -- I predict we will see more and more instances where the same applications will be deployed in both environments, enabling each of these architectures to adopt one another’s best attributes."

Aleksandra Mitroshkina, senior manager, product marketing at Percona, thinks short-term cost increases will cause long-term spending spirals unless teams make changes:

The biggest concern for cloud is the one that's always been there - cost at scale. Paying strictly for what you consume allows users to keep costs down and avoid waste, but it also requires an understanding of how your application behaves and how users interact with it. Unpredictable spikes in workload, especially those that the application should have been more efficient with, can be very costly. You're paying for what you use, but you may not always use what was calculated for.

Cloud services like database as a service (DBaaS) can scale up easily, which is a great advantage for the business, but this scale-up can easily get out of control. In 2024, more teams will have to guard against these spikes in costs by spending time to tune their underlying infrastructure, so they can break this cycle and cut their bills significantly.

Anil Inamdar, the Global Head of Data Services at Instaclustr, says, "Expect to see hybrid and multi-cloud data platforms rising in availability and popularity throughout 2024 (and to be deployed across both operational and analytical systems). These increasingly advanced data management cloud tools will make it simpler to operate data technologies across the hybrid infrastructure that many organizations now prefer -- spanning on-premise, private cloud, and public cloud options. Businesses lacking internal expertise will likely put some of that budget toward cloud service providers to migrate and implement secure and efficient multi-cloud data platforms without hiccups. This cloud strategy -- gaining the capabilities to seamlessly store, replicate, process, and manage unified data across multiple infrastructures -- will enable more organizations in 2024 to achieve more flexibility, availability and scalability, while still harnessing the unique strengths that each infrastructure type has to offer. CloudOps visibility will also play an increasingly pivotal role as this cloud trend accelerates."

Law Floyd, Chief of Security Operations at Telos Corporation says, "Research shows that 48 percent of organizations plan to migrate at least half of their applications to the cloud in the next year, and 20 percent intend to move all their applications to the cloud. As this migration continues, more and more organizations will discover that moving to the cloud alone isn't enough. Cloud and hybrid cloud infrastructures bring a litany of benefits, but they’re most effective when they’re accompanied by continuous monitoring. In 2024, businesses will rely on continuous monitoring to maintain the health and performance of applications and services in the cloud. In other words, the cloud will push continuous monitoring into the playbook of risk management essentials."

Arick Goomanovsky, VP of Tenable Cloud Security sees more consolidation ahead. "Consolidation of cloud security products and vendors will accelerate throughout 2024 because of demand from customers, who now understand the power of cloud native security to transcend traditional silos and provide a unified, contextual risk picture. This means not only more secure applications, but better optimization of resources, skills and time, during a period when organizations are stretched to the limit."

Eyal Fisher, co-founder and CPO of Sweet Security expects security improvements through better runtime visibility. "The idea of runtime is not new and has been used across different attack vectors for a while. In the cloud, however, until recently, it's been a major blind spot, due mainly to technological constraints. Emerging technologies such as eBPF are driving innovation in cloud security across the board, but especially in runtime, where it is a critical foundational technology for providing much needed 'boots in the cloud'. We believe the ability to see and monitor events in runtime will make cloud-based attack detection and response the 'killer app' for cloud security in 2024. However, the benefits from runtime visibility and monitoring don’t end there. In addition to attack detection and response, runtime boots in the cloud also can also aid, at a minimum, discovery and posture management."

Paul Evans, cybersecurity evangelist at Nozomi Networks, says:

Looking to 2024, I anticipate a significant shift towards cloud technology for cyber security tooling, particularly for machine learning and pattern recognition applications that require extensive compute and storage resources. This shift will be driven by the need to use ever more sophisticated approaches for predicting and detecting cyberattacks.

While there has in the past been hesitancy in the operational technology (OT) space to move anything to the cloud, we are now starting to see changes as companies understand that pure on-prem solutions, whilst possibly sufficient at the moment, are unlikely to keep up with the tactics and techniques employed by future cyberattacks.

The emergence of a new generation of OT engineers who are more comfortable with cloud technology will also play a crucial role in driving this trend forward.

Shahar Man, co-founder and CEO of application security company Backslash Security thinks that security and cloud teams will need to work closer together. "In 2024, the fusion of company AppSec and CloudSec teams will become more prevalent -- we've already seen this movement begin within our customer base. The consensus driving this trend is that working separately within these silos is not efficient and that the combined team unit can create a unified and complete security strategy for both applications and cloud environments."

Bar Kaduri from Orca Research Pod thinks we'll see a rise in cloud-native malware. "As cloud services become increasingly interconnected and data transfers between various cloud platforms occur frequently, the risk of cloud-native malware infections rises with attackers becoming increasingly more sophisticated. Just a few weeks ago, an analysis of the Dagon Locker Ransomware by The DFIR Report showed how attackers are utilizing AWS knowledge to move within an AWS account and exfiltrate data. Leveraging existing cloud functionality and tools to conduct what appears like legitimate user activities, often known as masquerading, can reduce detection and allow for prolonged presence inside the cloud environment. Cybercriminals are continually developing new techniques to exploit vulnerabilities in cloud infrastructure to distribute malware, conduct phishing attacks, or compromise sensitive data."

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