Though the cloud has a long history, it shows no sign of slowing down.

Yes, cloud adoption is up. Multi-cloud strategies are the norm. And what was once an industry buzzword is now firmly established as the dominant enterprise computing model.

But while it's easy to see that the cloud is moving fast, it's not so easy to guess where it might end up.

Let's turn to the experts. Here are nine research-driven statistics that predict where the cloud will take us in the next 11 months – and beyond.

1. Public cloud spending will hit nearly $600 billion

That's according to a forecast by Gartner, the industry's leading research firm.

If Gartner's sums add up, we can expect global end-user spending on public cloud services to hit $591.8 billion this year – an increase of 20.7% on 2022 and 43.4% on 2021.

In 2022, Gartner expected the market to grow by 18.8%. This means 2023 will see public cloud services grow by an additional 1.9%. Woah Nelly!

2. IaaS will see the highest spending increase

Gartner predicts that software as a service (SaaS) will see the most spend of all public cloud services, but it's infrastructure as a service (IaaS) that will enjoy the largest growth.

Spending on SaaS services is expected to hit more than $195 billion in 2023. IaaS spending, on the other hand, will reach around $150 billion.

But this means IaaS will have grown by more than 65% since 2021, while SaaS will trail behind with a growth rate of around 33%.

3.  Despite Stadia, cloud gaming isn't dead

As a form of cloud-based entertainment, cloud gaming has been heralded as a golden goose and decried as a money-sapping folly – often by the same news outlet.

This is largely due to the failure of Google's Stadia platform, which launched with high hopes in 2019 and closed down barely three years later.

Now other gaming giants have moved in on Google's territory, with products like PlayStation Now, GeForce Now and Xbox Cloud Gaming. And research by Newzoo suggests that they've found a committed audience.

According to Newzoo's Global Cloud Gaming Report, the cloud gaming market may be worth more than $6 billion by 2024.

That's a drop in the ocean when compared to cloud spending as a whole, but it at least proves that the market is alive and well.

4.  Microsoft's OneDrive is the most popular cloud-based enterprise app

In its 2022 Cloud and Threat Report, Netskope looked at anonymised usage data from millions of global users to determine the most-used cloud apps among enterprises.

Which came out on top? It's a non-mover – Microsoft OneDrive leads the pack, just as it did in 2021.

Yes, Microsoft's cloud storage solution was used by more than 40% of Netskope users on an average day, beating out competition from the likes of Google Drive, Sharepoint and Gmail.

While the app was consistently popular across industry verticals, it saw the most usage in financial services (51%) and the least in healthcare (27%).

5. Uploads are up

Another takeaway from Netskope's report: more and more users are uploading data to cloud apps. Its research showed increased user uploads for each of the apps it studied.

OneDrive was top of the table, again, for user uploads. In 2022, more than 20% of users uploaded data to OneDrive on an average day, compared to five per cent in 2021.

6. 40% of businesses will adopt a cloud-native-first strategy

Research firm Forrester predicts that cloud-native applications will become even more popular in 2023, with 40% of firms adopting a cloud-native-first approach.

This means a shift from virtual machines (VMs) to containerised applications, supported by technologies like Kubernetes and VMware's vSphere with Tanzu.

7. SASE solutions will continue to gain popularity

Secure access service edge, or SASE, is a type of "networking as a service" first defined by Gartner in 2019. A SASE solution bundles a software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) with several security components and delivers them as a holistic service via the cloud.

In a recent press release, Gartner identified SASE as one of the top trends that will impact infrastructure and operations in 2023 – and SASE was first on the list.

In addition, the research firm predicted that global end-user SASE spending will hit $9.2 billion this year. That represents a 39% increase on 2022.

8. Cloud AI will grow at pace over the next few years

It's plain to see that artificial intelligence (AI) will be hugely influential. After all, the netosphere is still losing its collective mind over ChatGPT.

But AI has many use cases beyond writing last-minute essays and having amusingly strange conversations. Businesses, for instance, can use it to automate tasks, perform data analytics, build better customer relationships and more.

The problem is that AI processing demands huge amounts of bandwidth and compute power – far more than most companies can afford.

This is where cloud AI comes in. By leveraging the power of the cloud, businesses can offload CPU-heavy AI processing to those big, burly data centres in the sky.

Consequently, the market for cloud-based AI is expected to grow dramatically. According to one forecast, the cloud AI market will be valued at $13.1 billion by 2026. That pans out as a CAGR of 20.3% from 2021.

9.  There will be 27 billion IoT devices by 2025

Despite market challenges such as the pandemic and the associated global chip shortage, the use of internet of things (IoT) devices is still expected to enjoy healthy growth in the coming years.

One research firm predicts that there will be 17.2 billion connected IoT devices in 2023, rising to a massive 27 billion in 2025. That represents a CAGR of 22% between 2021 and 2025.

Are you keen to migrate to the cloud? Do you want to do more with your cloud infrastructure? As a specialist cloud consultancy run by recognised VMware experts, Ascend is here to help you accelerate your ambition. Get in touch today to get started.