Forrester’s top 10 cloud trends for 2024 report is out. No one will be surprised that AI figures prominently. Yet there are other fundamental shifts in play — the rise of the intelligent edge, increased cloud compliance complexity, and (finally!) mature multicloud networking offerings.

Tracking these trends was a collective effort with all of my colleagues who cover cloud. Together we curated a list of the most important cloud topics that technology decision-makers should be aware of.

Cloud is the critical infrastructure backbone for enterprises in every industry and size globally, but its scope is expanding. The standard definition of cloud as basic infrastructure services from a major public cloud provider has widened to include edge with intelligent capabilities and generative AI (genAI)-augmented services that span from operations to application development. Cloud strategies are evolving as a result to address new concerns in governance, risk, and security, and face challenges in procurement and vendor management.

To give you a preview of our top 10 cloud trends, here are a few of Lee’s and my favorites:

  • Trend 1: Alternative clouds go mainstream for AI and edge workloads. NVIDIA and AI-focused VCs have given a boost to AI cloud startups. To date, some of the biggest players have raised billions in funding with the big draw being their massive supply of GPUs. Even with this momentum, don’t expect the major public cloud providers to be displaced.
  • Trend 5: VMware’s new business model drives migration to native public cloud services. The easy phase of lift-and-shift to VMware services on public cloud has passed. Enterprises are now migrating apps heavily integrated in on-prem infrastructure. Tech-savvy and motivated enterprises are leveraging big hardware company offerings such as storage APIs to completely decouple from legacy architecture.
  • Trend 8: Edge environments take center stage. IoT and edge capabilities are getting a major overhaul as cloud providers encroach with distributed cloud offerings. Content delivery networks (CDNs) with expanded intelligent edge environments are also jumping in. The intersection of genAI and localized LLMs increases the draw for tech decision-makers.

If you want to learn more:

Last, keep an eye out for these upcoming reports!

      • Predictions 2025: Cloud Computing (publishing early October)
      • Scoring Our 2024 Cloud Predictions (publishing December)