Greetings. We are the mClouds team. Every September, we read dozens of analytical reports and analyze which trends will affect and are already affecting cloud technologies. This time we decided to share with you what we will focus on in the next five years. So, here we go: five global trends that will determine the future of Russian clouds.

#1. Moving workloads to the cloud

In the next five years, cloud technologies will penetrate all areas of the economy, even those that have so far followed an on-premise strategy due to strict requirements for information security. This is the verdict of both Western and Russian industry analysts.

According to the iKS-Consulting study published in June 2024, last year the total volume of the Russian IaaS and PaaS market grew by almost 34% and approached the mark of 121.4 billion rubles.

The reasons are clear:

• acceleration of digitization of all sectors of the economy;

• growing workloads and the high cost of owning and upgrading on-premise infrastructure;

• shortage of personnel in IT;

• growing competition from players who are actively moving business processes to the cloud;

• the ability to quickly change the amount of consumed computing resources if necessary.

Over the next five years, cloud providers will receive an average of 19,000 new customers per year who have not yet worked in the cloud. Even the energy industry, defense industry, insurance and medical companies, where there are serious IT requirements, will move partially or completely to the cloud.

Big business and national corporations will rather use a hybrid model, dividing the workload between private clouds on local infrastructure and public clouds on the infrastructure of providers. According to our internal statistics, at mClouds, about 70% of medium-sized business customers already work according to a hybrid model: they keep part of the services in the cloud, and part of them on their infrastructure site.

Small and medium-sized businesses gravitate more towards the IaaS model. There is a whole set of reasons for that:

• the increase in the cost of owning one’s own IT infrastructure due to the care of global vendors – import-substitution equipment turned out to be more expensive than Western equipment, and Russian software continues to increase in price by 15-30% year on year;

• increasing cyberattacks on Russian business and the lack of internal competences to prevent them;

• more providers – a wider range of services that can be combined.

According to analysts’ forecasts, by 2028 the level of IaaS penetration in the SME segment may double compared to 2023.

Due to the support of the state and the spread of cloud infrastructure services to those sectors of the economy that so far preferred to work on-premise, by 2027 the share of cloud services in Russian GDP, according to iKS-Consulting, will double from 0.07 to 0.15% .

Russian analysts also believe that the future lies in platform services with a ready-made set of tools for developing and deploying programs. In this way, the business will be able to kill two birds with one stone: to overcome the shortage of qualified personnel in IT and to smooth out the increase in the cost of equipment.

We at mClouds see a growing demand:

• on platform tools and services for generative AI and ML;

• for cloud servers with GPU – mClouds has already increased the offer for such servers and continues to import new video cards;

• for information security services;

• for transferring employees’ workplaces to the cloud.

In order to prepare for the future, it makes sense for providers to develop a product portfolio, perhaps by joining forces with other market players and creating a kind of marketplace of cloud services.

#2. Hybrids and multiclouds

One cloud is no longer enough. Some companies become hostages of multicloud involuntarily, for example, as a result of a merger. Others choose this model consciously — in order to optimize the budget and get a maximum of convenient tools and services. Others are cautiously trying the cloud, leaving critical processes on their own IT infrastructure. But, one way or another, the share of these two models – hybrid and multi-cloud – is growing all over the world. And Russia is no exception.

Distributing workloads across multiple cloud providers allows businesses to reduce the risks of outages and data leaks, as well as minimize potential consequences. More details about the pros and cons of this approach were written in the previous article.

According to various estimates, 20–30% of companies in Russia now use multicloud. Most organizations are inclined to a hybrid model of IT infrastructure consumption and are ready to transfer only a part of non-critical processes to public clouds, leaving the rest on local infrastructure or in a private cloud, notes iKS-Consulting.

#3. Sovereign clouds and security

The need for cloud sovereignty is a global trend.

According to analysts, this trend has significantly increased in the Asia-Pacific region in recent years. The main reasons:

• geopolitical tensions in the region;

• governments’ need for digital autonomy and control over where and how sensitive data is stored: the IAAP estimates that data protection laws are currently in place in 137 countries worldwide;

• cyber security issues: according to StormWall, the number of DDoS attacks worldwide increased by 60% last year alone, and there is no reason to believe that they will decrease in the next year;

• data processing speed, which directly depends on the localization of the IT infrastructure.

In Russia, by the end of 2024, they plan to launch the national project “Data economy and digital transformation of the state” with funding of up to 2.7 trillion. rubles by 2030. Cloud computing and services have been announced as one of the priority areas of the national project.

From the business side, there is also a demand for IT services. When choosing a cloud provider, preference will be given to those who have their own IT departments and information security monitoring centers. And it’s good if the provider’s information security services include additional protection elements, such as cryptogateways and next-generation firewalls. As they say, draw your own conclusions.

#4. Branch clouds

Industry cloud platforms, or ICPs, are specially designed for a specific industry: retail, industry, insurance. The modular structure allows you to quickly adapt them to your specific needs without much effort or expense. And clear specialization facilitates integration with industry systems, such as CRM, ERP and others.

Russian cloud providers are also trying to include offers for various types of companies in their product portfolio. However, so far the focus segments are represented by three groups: large companies, SMEs and the state. There are not many industry offers on the market right now. Analysts agree that this is a matter of two or three years.

We at mClouds believe that the creation of industry clouds will be economically justified only if there is already a sales market. Often, such solutions arise around hardware or software that has already become an industry standard.

#5. AI will require new capacities and new approaches to energy efficiency

Artificial intelligence, machine learning, remote work with graphics, and big data processing — all of this will both simplify and complicate our lives in the cloud in the near future.

What can be “buts” here:

• The proliferation of AI, ML, remote graphics solutions, and more will demand new capacities from data centers and drive demand for GPU servers. We at mClouds have also started providing GPUs for working and training neural networks based on NVIDIA L4 and NVIDIA L40S cards. AI uses graphics cards for computing, and graphics applications for their intended purpose, and both trends are growing. This means that the demand for GPUs will grow.

• Using GPUs in servers requires more power for data centers.

• Already, data centers use 1-2% of all electricity generated in the world, and by 2030, analysts predict an increase in the indicator to 10%. After working, data centers emit this energy into the atmosphere. The climate suffers. At the same time, the possibilities to return the PUE indicator to normal values ​​due to the modernization of the data center are practically exhausted.

• In order for servers not to overheat under such loads, new approaches to cooling are needed.

• Rising electricity prices, a shortage of computer chips, and the rise in popularity of GPUs will inevitably drive up public cloud prices.

So our latest trend consists entirely of problems that will just have to be solved. What options can there be:

• Legislative regulation. For example, in the Netherlands, all new data centers must maintain a PUE value of no more than 1.2, and in Singapore – 1.3. And the Australian government plans to introduce mandatory climate-related reporting. At first, only for large companies.

• Creation of energy-efficient computing capacities. Foreign analysts predict the appearance of processors that use dynamic voltage and frequency scaling.

• Additional cooling of servers. Different options are possible here. For example, energy-saving liquid cooling systems.

• Reuse of excess heat and data centers. The UK government recently announced that it will direct it to provide cheap heating for more than 10,000 homes.

• Construction of data centers next to nuclear power plants. In global practice, this approach is already being used to solve the problem of capacity shortages. There are similar projects in Russia. Among them are the Rostelecom data center at the site of the Kalinin NPP and the Sbera data center under construction in Balakovo.