Top 5 Predictions from Gartner® Related to the Cloud and the Edge

Gartner Predicts 2022 report series makes predictions across a number of industries for the coming year. Here are the ones we found most surprising.

The Gartner® Predicts 2022 report series is a terrific way to catch up on their recent research from the past year, which always highlights industry trends to watch. But more importantly, Gartner uses their findings to make recommendations to Infrastructure and Operations leaders for the coming year. The reports are also filled with some eye-popping stats and predictions from their surveys.

We’ve chosen a few related to cloud computing, SASE and SD-WAN, and the edge, and discuss what they recommend in the light of these predictions.

Here are our top five predictions from Gartner Predicts 2022 and a couple of bonus ones regarding the use of MPLS:

5. According to Gartner, “By 2025, 75% of large enterprises will build self-service development platforms to improve internal developer experience and drive product innovation, up from 20% in 2021.”¹

A great example of this trend toward building a self-service development platform to accelerate product innovation is NXP, which built a Cloud Center of Excellence or a “cloud-landing platform” to enable their developers to use applications in the cloud easily and reliability in order to spin up and take down test environments at will to increase development velocity. Accelerated development velocity and increased knowledge sharing and learning between teams means that digital innovation happens faster.

Gartner recommends building these platforms to “democratize access to cloud capabilities.” These platforms require fast, easy, and reliable network connectivity to the cloud to work well. And that’s where Megaport excelled, underpinning NXP’s Cloud Center of Excellence.

4. According to Gartner, “By 2025, 70% of organizations will implement structured infrastructure automation to deliver flexibility and efficiency, up from 20% in 2021.”²

The infrastructure automation tools Gartner is referring to include hybrid cloud infrastructure orchestration and self-service and on-demand environment creation, in support of DevOps initiatives, such as continuous integration, delivery, and deployment.

Back in 2021, we wrote about Megaport’s Terraform Provider as a way for DevOps teams to automate the spin-up and tear down of cloud environments, and many of our customers have begun to implement these infrastructure automation tools to drive greater network agility, flexibility, and cost-efficiency.

3. According to Gartner, “By 2025, 35% of companies that use multiple public cloud providers will use a single network stack, an increase of more than 10x from 2021.”³

As Gartner notes in the report “Predicts 2022: Driving Toward Digital Infrastructure Platforms” and as we’ve written about in blog posts like this one, enterprises are starting to see that they need “consistent networking across multiple cloud environments”. According to Gartner, “more than 75% of organizations use multiple public cloud services today, and have plans to expand.” Networking that ties these multicloud environments together is key, and Gartner accurately points out that “networking capabilities vary widely among public cloud providers.”

Gartner recommends I&O leaders “enable advanced networking features and/or network consistency within multicloud deployments by using third-party cloud networking software.”

2. According to Gartner, “By 2025, enterprises using on-demand consumption models in their WAN services will rise from less than 5% in 2021 to 30%”.⁴

Gartner points to a number of factors driving the emergence of enterprises seeking on-demand consumption models in their WAN services. Growing cloud adoption and increasingly distributed networking are being driven in part by the rise of remote work, and that means that enterprises require greater network agility to support the rapidly changing needs of the business. In the report “Predicts 2022: CSPs Need Composability to Move Forward With B2B Edge and Networking Services,”Gartner recommends that businesses “use network on-demand services when high levels of network agility” are needed. 

Among our customers, we’ve seen that companies that must support operations in numerous locations across multiple regions often need particularly high levels of network agility. Framestore is a good example, as a company with interconnected workflows between the London and New York offices. They needed the speed and agility to connect to the clouds they needed, when they needed it, without interrupting work due to lost connectivity on either side of the Atlantic.

1. According to Gartner, “By 2025, enterprises using SDCI to connect to cloud services will rise from less than 10% in 2021 to 30%.”⁵

Also in the report “Predicts 2022: CSPs Need Composability to Move Forward With B2B Edge and Networking Services,” Gartner points to digital acceleration and increasing cloud adoption, particularly for critical workloads, as the driving factors of enterprise operations becoming more and more dependent on “connectivity to, within, and between clouds.” Meanwhile, the rise of multicloud, distributed applications, and “cloud-to-cloud and intercloud-region use cases” are increasing the overall complexity of cloud connectivity.

Software-Defined Cloud Interconnection (SDCI) is one of the composable services designed to simplify cloud connectivity, by offering easy-to-use portals to quickly connect to multiple clouds and other service providers using preprovisioned connections.

Gartner on MPLS

In a couple of recent reports outside of the Predicts 2022 series, Gartner makes some interesting projections related to MPLS. Gartner writes that by 2023, “more than 70% of enterprise network traffic will shift from private MPLS networks to connectivity with cloud service providers, up from 30% today”⁶ and that by 2024, “more than 30% of global enterprise WANs will use an enhanced internet backbone instead of MPLS, an increase from less than 10% in early 2021.”⁷

These two predictions point to how rapidly enterprise networks are transforming to support the digitalization of their businesses, as well the increasing adoption of SD-WAN and SASE technologies. The sea change is happening now as legacy networking is no longer agile or cloudlike enough in their consumption models for companies in the midst of digital transformation initiatives. 

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¹Gartner®, Predicts 2022: Operationalizing the Distributed Enterprise, By Bjarne Munch, Kenneth Gonzalez, Manjunath Bhat, Padraig Byrne, Josh Chessman, 19 October 2021.

²Gartner®, Predicts 2022: Driving Toward Digital Infrastructure Platforms, By Thomas Bittman, Jonathan Forest, Hiroko Aoyama, Philip Dawson, Bob Gill, 21 October 2021.

³Gartner®, Predicts 2022: Connecting the Digital Enterprise, By Andrew Lerner, John Watts, Joe Skorupa, 2 December 2021.

^{4, 5}Gartner®, Predicts 2022: CSPs Need Composability to Move Forward With B2B Edge and Networking Services, By Pablo Arriandiaga, Kosei Takiishi, To Chee Eng, Gaspar Valdivia, Daniel O’Connell, 3 December 2021.

⁶Gartner®, Cloud Creates New Opportunities in Composable Connectivity and Edge-Based Services, By To Chee Eng, Gregor Petri, 10 December 2021.

⁷Gartner®, Include Enhanced Internet as a Viable Option for the Global SD-WAN Backbone, By Bjarne Munch, Neil Rickard, Danellie Young, 13 September 2021.

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