SoftIron, the worldwide leader in true private cloud infrastructure, today announced its top ten predictions for the ever-evolving world of Information Technology (IT) in 2024 and beyond. These predictions reflect the insights of the SoftIron leadership team, gathered through extensive discussions and industry analysis.

Prediction #1: Cloud Strategy Maturity - The rush to adopt public cloud services will transition from being "fashionable" to "rational", driving more sophisticated hybrid strategies. Market maturity, economic factors, and a simplification of private cloud-native infrastructure will drive a more thoughtful and strategic approach. Understanding the distinction between cloud as a model and cloud as a place will be crucial.  

Prediction #2: Geopolitical Impact on IT - Geopolitical instability is expected to persist in 2024, prompting nation-states to focus on boosting their sovereign resilience. This includes investments in sovereign clouds, tactical edge capabilities, and protection against state-sponsored cyberattacks on critical infrastructure.  

Prediction #3: Sovereign Cloud Evolution - Pseudo-sovereign cloud projects that rely on obfuscated infrastructure will struggle to gain traction. True sovereign resilience, allowing nation-states to own and manage their infrastructure on their own terms, will become the preferred choice.  

Prediction #4: VMware's Influence on Cloud-Native Infrastructure - The acquisition of VMware will spur their customers to revisit their on-premise IT infrastructure, driving an opportunity to shift towards fully cloud-native solutions capable of consolidating and simplifying all of their on-premise workloads.  

Prediction #5: Fragmented Public Cloud Market - Competition in the public cloud market will intensify as customers prioritize value, workload migration decisions, and specialized cloud service providers. New entrants, driven by new dynamics and points of differentiation like AI, will enter the market, contributing to market specialization and fragmentation.  

Prediction #6: Private Cloud Renaissance - The availability of cloud-native infrastructure will lead to a resurgence of private cloud adoption. Cloud Centers of Excellence (CCoEs) will, for the first time, be able to both compare and apply uniform policies between both public and private clouds. Open standards like FOCUS, the FinOps cost, and usage specification will help facilitate this shift.  

Prediction #7: Shift Away from Hyper-Converged Infrastructure - Hyper-converged infrastructure will slow significantly, with its elastic scaling limitations and integration challenges. It will be relegated to smaller, departmental solutions only.  

Prediction #8: IT Skills Shortage and Simplification - Organizations will seek out and adopt innovative new technologies able to deliver operational simplicity to combat the IT skills shortage and budget constraints. A shift towards and consolidation based on cloud-native infrastructure in the data center will help address these complexity challenges.  

Prediction #9: Resurgence of Hardware Innovation - Investments in hardware innovation will become more commonplace, driven by AI and processing power requirements. This will reinvigorate interest in “hard tech” and hardware-related startups, disrupting traditional IT infrastructure design.  

Prediction #10: Complexity of Consumption-Based Models - Large providers of consumption-based on-premises infrastructure will face challenges in delivering seamless and profitable services. Customers will question the "complexity tax" (i.e., cost of staff needed to integrate and operate these services) associated with these models, which results in a steep premium vs. capex-only technology acquisition.  

“As we step into 2024, the IT landscape is poised for significant changes and challenges,” said Andrew Moloney, Chief Strategy Officer at SoftIron. “SoftIron remains committed to staying at the forefront of these developments, providing innovative solutions to meet the evolving needs of our customers.”  

For more detail and color on each prediction, please see SoftIron’s blog.