Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2025. Read them in this 17th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Pat Patterson, Chief Evangelist at Backblaze
Now that we’re in the mature phase of the cloud industry, the most exciting opportunities will revolve around technologies that provide businesses with greater flexibility, lower costs, enhanced performance, and improved security across a distributed Open Cloud world. Enterprises that focus on the next generation of cloud infrastructure, focusing on interoperability, security, and AI/ML integration will be set for success in the new year.
Prediction #1: The Rise of the Open Cloud
The Open Cloud concept will continue to evolve rapidly in 2025, driven by a growing demand for flexibility, interoperability, transparency, and control in cloud services. As organizations increasingly rely on multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud architectures, the Open Cloud’s principles – openness, collaboration, and user empowerment – will become even more central to the way cloud computing is delivered and consumed. The need for seamless integration between different cloud providers and on-premises systems will drive further development of open-source standards and frameworks. We expect to see more efforts toward multi-cloud compatibility, making it easier for companies to run workloads across various clouds without being locked into one provider’s ecosystem.
An example that we’re seeing right now is the ongoing shortage of GPU capacity driving organizations training large AI models to look outside the legacy hyperscalers for available resources, fueling the growth of specialized compute providers. This redistribution of AI workloads is highlighting the artificially high egress fees demanded by legacy cloud providers, and causing customers to replicate, and even migrate, training data to specialized cloud storage providers. In short, customers want and will continue to want the flexibility of going where the GPUs are.
Prediction #2: AI Will Continue to Impact Pricing Models, Technological and Performance Capabilities
In 2025, AI will impact both the pricing models and technological capabilities of cloud storage. AI-driven storage optimization, dynamic and usage-based pricing, and the introduction of AI-specific storage solutions for machine learning and AI workloads will drive cost reductions, improved efficiency, and faster data access. Despite reports of its impending implosion, AI/ML continues to dominate the cloud computing agenda. Cloud storage providers will tap AI to build a new layer of enhanced services on their existing data storage/retrieval foundations, delivering business insights derived from both the data itself and the way in which it is accessed.
One of the most surprising aspects of AI/ML workloads is the ability to trade off availability for performance when training models with very large data sets. When you have millions of hours of video training data, keeping the GPUs busy turns out to be more important than retrieving every last minute of footage, and we’ve seen AI developers tuning their storage clients with short timeouts and no retries. We may see new storage offerings for AI/ML that reflect this key difference from existing practice, which prioritizes the ability to retrieve every byte of the data set.
Prediction #3: Edge Computing Adoption Acceleration
Organizations will accelerate their adoption of edge computing, taking advantage of the increasing capabilities of edge devices to reduce spend on centralized compute. We’ll see continuing separation of the control and data planes, with edge devices interacting directly with cloud storage instead of sending data via a server application.
The Next Year of Cloud Storage
With increasing concerns about data privacy, breaches, and regulatory requirements, security, data sovereignty, and compliance, it is more important than ever for businesses to stay up-to-date with trends within the industry. As we enter a new year, IT leaders and decision-makers have the opportunity to restructure their cloud storage strategies. Understanding the changing landscape of the cloud industry and where emerging technologies will make the biggest impacts will best prepare enterprises to mitigate costs, protect user data and disaster recovery and become innovators in their industry.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Pat Patterson is Chief Technical Evangelist at Backblaze. Over his three decades in the industry, Pat has built software and communities at Sun Microsystems, Salesforce, StreamSets, and Citrix. In his role at Backblaze, he creates and delivers content tailored to the needs of the hands-on technical professional, acts as the ‘voice of the developer’ in the product team, and actively participates in the wider technical community. Outside the office, Pat runs far, having completed ultramarathons up to the 50 mile distance.
