This article is based on cloud computing predictions published by Forrester Research and originally reported by Forbes in late 2019. Figures and forecasts reflect analyst estimates made at that time.
A Market in Motion: The Cloud Landscape Heading Into 2020
The cloud computing industry closed out 2019 with a flurry of consolidation and unlikely partnerships. IBM completed its acquisition of Red Hat. VMware reabsorbed Pivotal. Oracle and Microsoft announced high-speed interconnects between Oracle Cloud and Azure. VMware brought its Cloud Foundation to Google Cloud. Frenemies moved closer together, incumbents expanded their reach, and the conventional wisdom about who was winning the cloud wars was due for a serious update.
Analyst firm Forrester Research had predicted in 2018 that enterprises would begin modernizing core business applications with cloud in 2019 — and that transformation had clearly taken hold. As DevOps and platform engineering teams prepared their roadmaps for 2020, several key themes emerged from industry analysts.
Market Size: A $299 Billion Combined Cloud Market
Forecasts at the time projected the combined public cloud market — spanning SaaS (cloud applications), PaaS (development and data platforms), and IaaS (infrastructure services) — to reach approximately $299.4 billion in 2020. That figure represented continued strong growth even as the market began to mature and consolidate. Analysts also noted that the market was on a trajectory toward half a trillion dollars within a few years.
Enterprise adoption was already deep: around 65% of North American enterprises were reported to rely on public cloud platforms, while 66% ran internal private clouds — a sign that hybrid cloud was the dominant real-world architecture, not a transitional state.
Three Key Predictions for 2020
1. IBM and Oracle Retreat to Strengths; Alibaba Challenges Google
The hyperscale public cloud market was seen as firmly dominated by AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud. The prediction was that IBM and Oracle would not exit that market but would strategically retreat to their core competencies rather than compete head-on with the hyperscale leaders.
- IBM was expected to focus on helping enterprises adopt Red Hat’s OpenShift container platform — positioning it as a cloud-agnostic modernization layer that could run on any hyperscaler.
- Oracle was expected to double down on its SaaS products and Autonomous Database, while directing customers toward Azure for general-purpose cloud services such as AI/ML, Kubernetes, IoT, and containers. Analysts also predicted Oracle would ink a high-speed connectivity deal with AWS or Google to serve its existing database customers.
- Alibaba Cloud was projected to generate approximately $4.5 billion in global cloud platform revenue, surpassing Google in global terms — but Google was expected to retain third place in North America due to Alibaba’s limited footprint in that region.
For DevOps teams, this meant an increasingly multi-cloud reality: enterprise workloads would span IBM/Red Hat tooling, Oracle databases, and hyperscaler compute — all requiring coherent CI/CD pipelines, identity federation, and observability strategies.
2. Cloud-Native Development Battles: Service Meshes and Serverless
By late 2019, Kubernetes had won the container orchestration wars. But winning the orchestration layer only opened new battlegrounds. Two areas were predicted to see fierce competition in 2020:
- Service meshes — offering interservice networking, traffic management, observability, and security for microservices architectures. Istio was identified as the leading contender, though no single solution had definitively won.
- Serverless computing — abstracting workloads entirely from infrastructure concerns and enabling event-driven programming models. Knative was seen as a strong open-source foundation for serverless on Kubernetes.
The expectation was that most enterprises would consume both technologies not as standalone open-source projects but as curated components within cloud-native development platforms offered by AWS, Microsoft, Google, VMware/Pivotal, or IBM/Red Hat. The hundreds of competing open-source projects and vendors in the CNCF ecosystem were expected to consolidate around platform distributions rather than survive as independent products.
For platform engineers and SREs, this was a clear signal: evaluate Istio and Knative not in isolation, but as part of the broader platform your organization is standardizing on.
3. Cloud Management Vendors Must Pivot to Security
The Capital One data breach — which exposed more than 100 million customer records from an AWS-hosted workload through a misconfigured web application firewall — put cloud security squarely in the spotlight in 2019. Predictions for 2020 centered on how the industry would respond:
- Hyperscale cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) were expected to accelerate investment in their native security tooling — such as posture management, secrets management, and runtime threat detection.
- Cross-cloud management vendors were expected to buy, build, or acquire security capabilities that went well beyond traditional identity and access management (IAM). The argument was that IAM alone is insufficient in a hybrid cloud environment where misconfiguration, lateral movement, and supply chain risk are primary attack vectors.
- VMware’s acquisition of Carbon Black in 2019 was cited as an early signal of this trend — embedding endpoint and workload security directly into virtualization, cloud management, and container platforms.
For security engineers and DevSecOps practitioners, this predicted shift translated into a clearer mandate: security tooling must be integrated into the platform layer, not bolted on after deployment. Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) and runtime protection were expected to become table stakes.
What This Meant for Engineering Teams
Taken together, these predictions pointed toward several practical priorities for DevOps and platform engineering teams entering 2020:
- Plan for multi-cloud by default. No single vendor was expected to dominate across all workload types. Portability through Kubernetes and OpenShift was increasingly the hedge organizations were making.
- Invest in service mesh literacy early. Service meshes introduce real operational complexity. Teams that began evaluating Istio in 2020 would have a head start on the skills needed to run it in production.
- Treat security as a platform concern, not a ticket. The Capital One breach demonstrated that misconfiguration — not just malicious attackers — is a leading cloud risk. Shifting security left and embedding it in platform tooling was becoming a requirement, not a best practice.
- Watch the Oracle-Azure alliance carefully. For teams running Oracle databases alongside Azure services, the high-speed interconnect between the two clouds had real implications for latency, data residency, and architecture decisions.
Source Attribution
The predictions summarized in this article were originally reported by Forbes based on Forrester Research analyst forecasts published in late 2019. Market figures (e.g., the $299.4 billion combined cloud market estimate and Alibaba’s $4.5 billion revenue projection) reflect Forrester’s estimates at the time of publication and should be interpreted as point-in-time forecasts, not verified outcomes.