This article is based on Forrester Research’s 2020 cloud computing predictions, originally summarized by ZDNet in November 2019. Statistics and forecasts reflect analyst estimates made at that time.
The Cloud Landscape Heading into 2020
The cloud computing market entered 2020 on the back of a transformative 2019. Forrester had predicted that enterprises would begin modernizing core business applications with cloud platforms, and that migration did accelerate. At the same time, major industry moves reshaped competitive dynamics: IBM completed its acquisition of Red Hat, VMware reabsorbed Pivotal, Oracle partnered with Microsoft on high-speed connectivity between Oracle Cloud and Azure, and VMware brought its Cloud Foundation to Google Cloud.
These moves signaled a market in flux — longtime competitors forming pragmatic alliances, and incumbents doubling down on their core strengths rather than fighting on all fronts simultaneously.
Market Size and Adoption Benchmarks
According to Forrester’s projections made in late 2019, the combined public cloud market — spanning SaaS (cloud applications), PaaS (development and data platforms), and IaaS (infrastructure services) — was forecast to reach $299.4 billion in 2020. While growth rates were expected to moderate, analysts framed this as a sign of a maturing, consolidating market on a trajectory toward half a trillion dollars within a few years.
Adoption figures at the time reflected broad enterprise commitment to cloud:
- 65% of North American enterprises relied on public cloud platforms.
- 66% ran internal private clouds.
Key Prediction 1: Hyperscalers Refocus — IBM, Oracle Retreat to Strengths While Alibaba Challenges Google
Forrester anticipated that neither IBM nor Oracle would exit the hyperscale public cloud market — then dominated by AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud — but that each would strategically narrow their focus.
- IBM was expected to concentrate on helping enterprises use Red Hat’s OpenShift container platform to modernize core business applications across any cloud environment, rather than competing head-to-head with AWS or Azure on general-purpose infrastructure.
- Oracle was predicted to lean into its SaaS portfolio and autonomous database products, pointing customers toward Azure for general-purpose cloud services such as AI/ML, Kubernetes, containers, and IoT workloads. Analysts also expected Oracle to finalize high-speed connectivity agreements with AWS or Google to better serve its enterprise database customers.
- Alibaba Cloud was projected to generate approximately $4.5 billion in global cloud platform revenue, surpassing Google Cloud globally. However, Google was expected to retain its third-place ranking among North American clients due to Alibaba’s limited footprint in that region.
The broader theme: the hyperscale cloud wars were no longer purely about raw infrastructure competition. Specialization, strategic partnerships, and ecosystem control were becoming the primary battlegrounds.
Key Prediction 2: Open Source Cloud-Native Development Battles — Service Meshes and Serverless
With Kubernetes having effectively won the container orchestration category by 2019, Forrester turned its attention to the next wave of cloud-native technology battles: service meshes and serverless computing.
The cloud-native ecosystem was characterized by hundreds of competing open source projects and vendors. Two areas were expected to see concentrated competition in 2020:
- Service meshes promise advanced interservice networking, observability, and security for microservices architectures. Istio was identified as the standout project in this space.
- Serverless computing abstracts infrastructure entirely from developers, enabling event-driven programming models. Knative was considered a strong foundation for enterprise serverless adoption.
Forrester’s expectation was that neither Istio nor Knative would be adopted as standalone open source tools by most enterprises. Instead, both would most likely be consumed as components of integrated cloud-native development platforms offered by major vendors: AWS, Microsoft, Google, VMware/Pivotal, or IBM/Red Hat.
This pattern — open source innovation eventually absorbed into commercial platform offerings — was seen as the dominant adoption model for enterprise cloud-native tooling.
Key Prediction 3: Cloud Management Vendors Must Tackle Security
The Capital One data breach — which exposed over 100 million customer records stored in AWS — became a defining moment for cloud security in 2019. The incident demonstrated that misconfigured cloud environments, not necessarily flaws in cloud provider infrastructure, were a primary attack vector.
Forrester predicted that this breach, and others like it, would push cloud management vendors to elevate security from a secondary concern to a primary product focus. Specifically:
- Hyperscale cloud providers were expected to increase investment in native security tooling and services.
- Cross-cloud management vendors would need to go beyond traditional identity and access management (IAM), building or acquiring capabilities such as workload security, posture management, and runtime protection.
- VMware’s acquisition of Carbon Black in 2019 was cited as an early example of this shift — embedding security capabilities throughout cloud management, virtualization, and container products.
The underlying message: in an increasingly hybrid cloud world, security could no longer be bolted on after deployment. It needed to be integrated into the platforms that enterprises used to manage cloud infrastructure from the ground up.
Summary: Five Themes Forrester Identified for 2020
- Hyperscale public cloud leaders would form more alliances while refocusing on core strengths.
- Leading business application vendors would begin abandoning proprietary infrastructure stacks.
- High-performance computing (HPC) adoption on cloud would accelerate.
- The cloud-native development ecosystem would converge around service meshes and serverless platforms.
- Cloud management vendors would shift focus to security in response to major breach events.
For DevOps teams and platform engineers, these predictions pointed toward several practical priorities: evaluating service mesh tooling before the market locked in, treating cloud security posture management as a first-class engineering concern, and watching how IBM, Oracle, and the hyperscalers redefined their platform boundaries in 2020.
Source: Forrester Research 2020 Cloud Predictions, as reported by ZDNet (November 2019).