Originally sourced from Security Boulevard. Published March 2019. Preserved here as a historical snapshot of cloud computing expectations at the start of 2019.
The State of Cloud in Early 2019
By 2019, enterprise migration from legacy on-premises infrastructure to cloud platforms had shifted from experimental to mainstream. Organizations across sectors were pursuing cloud adoption not just for storage and cost savings, but as a foundational pillar of business automation, application availability, and global scalability.
With that backdrop, several patterns were emerging that analysts expected to define the cloud computing landscape throughout the year. Below are five predictions that reflected the key pressures and opportunities facing DevOps and IT teams in 2019.
1. Multi-Cloud Adoption Would Accelerate and Terminology Would Matter More
The cloud market in 2019 was no longer a binary choice between “cloud” and “on-premises.” Organizations were deploying across public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid configurations — often simultaneously. The term multi-cloud gained traction to describe environments that combine more than one cloud provider or model.
- Public cloud: Resources hosted and managed by a third-party provider, shared across multiple tenants (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google Cloud).
- Private cloud: Dedicated virtualized infrastructure operated for a single organization, either on-premises or hosted.
- Hybrid cloud: An integrated environment combining on-premises or private infrastructure with public cloud services.
A recurring challenge was the inconsistent use of these terms — vendors and teams often applied them interchangeably or incorrectly, complicating procurement, architecture decisions, and vendor comparisons. As multi-cloud strategies matured, precise terminology became operationally important.
2. Non-US Cloud Providers Would Gain Ground
The major US-based hyperscalers — AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform — dominated the global market, but 2019 signaled growing competition from non-US providers. Alibaba Cloud, the cloud arm of Alibaba Group, was frequently cited as a significant challenger, particularly in Asia-Pacific markets.
For small and medium-sized businesses evaluating cloud costs, non-US providers offered competitive pricing that made them worth consideration alongside the established players. Meanwhile, regulatory factors — including data sovereignty requirements in the EU and elsewhere — were already pushing some organizations toward regional providers regardless of cost.
The expectation was that incumbents and regulators would respond, whether through pricing adjustments, expanded regional infrastructure, or policy measures. This dynamic has since played out significantly in the years following 2019.
3. The Cloud Skills Gap Would Worsen Before It Improved
One of the most persistent challenges accompanying rapid cloud adoption was — and remains — a shortage of skilled practitioners. The pace of change across cloud platforms, the breadth of services, and the number of competing certification tracks made it difficult for organizations to find engineers with the right combination of skills.
Two responses were identified as practical paths forward:
- Retraining existing staff: Rather than competing exclusively for scarce external talent, organizations could invest in upskilling their current workforce — focusing on cloud fundamentals, infrastructure-as-code, and cloud-native development practices.
- Hiring for learning agility: Given how quickly cloud platforms evolve, the ability to learn rapidly became as important as existing cloud-specific knowledge.
This prediction has proven accurate. Cloud skills shortages have remained a consistent concern in DevOps hiring through the years following 2019, and internal training programs have become a standard part of cloud transformation initiatives.
4. Public Cloud Would Outpace On-Premises Innovation, Forcing Migration
In 2019, many enterprises still maintained on-premises data centers as their primary infrastructure, treating public cloud as a supplement or a future aspiration rather than an immediate priority. However, the pace at which AWS, Azure, and GCP were releasing new managed services — spanning AI/ML, serverless computing, container orchestration, and more — was creating a growing capability gap.
The prediction was that organizations clinging to on-premises-first strategies would increasingly find themselves unable to match the innovation velocity of competitors who had embraced public cloud. This would accelerate the adoption of public-cloud-first policies, where new workloads default to public cloud unless there is a specific regulatory, latency, or security reason not to.
For DevOps teams, this meant the pressure to support hybrid pipelines — CI/CD workflows that span on-premises and cloud environments — would intensify during the transition period.
5. Cloud Security Would Demand Greater Investment and Sophistication
As cloud infrastructure became more critical to business operations, it also became a more attractive target. The prediction for 2019 was that threat actors would deploy increasingly sophisticated techniques against cloud environments, requiring a corresponding upgrade in defensive capabilities across both public and private sectors.
Key areas identified for investment included:
- SIEM tools (Security Information and Event Management): Platforms that aggregate and correlate log data across cloud services to detect anomalies and respond to threats in near real time.
- Detection and response capabilities: Moving beyond perimeter-based security toward continuous monitoring of cloud workloads, identities, and configurations.
- Shared responsibility awareness: A recurring security gap was the misunderstanding of cloud providers’ shared responsibility models — where the provider secures the infrastructure, but the customer is responsible for securing their data, access controls, and application configurations.
Cloud security has since grown into one of the largest and most active segments of the cybersecurity industry, validating this directional prediction.
Looking Back: How These Predictions Held Up
Reviewing these predictions from a later vantage point, most of the directional trends proved accurate. Multi-cloud is now the norm rather than the exception. Non-US providers — particularly Alibaba Cloud — have carved out significant regional market share. The cloud skills gap has remained a persistent challenge. Public cloud adoption accelerated well beyond 2019 expectations, and cloud security has become one of the top priorities for security and engineering teams alike.
For DevOps engineers, the practical takeaway from this period is that cloud adoption is not a one-time migration project — it is an ongoing operational discipline requiring continuous upskilling, architectural adaptation, and security vigilance.