How has cloud computing advanced in recent years?
The number of enterprises moving some or all of their workloads off-premises and into the cloud has continued to climb into the 2020s, with Gartner reporting that public cloud spending will exceed 45% of all enterprise IT spending by the end of 2026, up from less than 17% in 2021. Worldwide spending on public cloud services is forecast to surpass $1 trillion in 2026, which is more than double what it was just a few years earlier, and is expected to double again by 2029, according to IDC.
What is the history of cloud computing?
It is thought that the principles of cloud computing began as far back as the 1960s when Joseph Licklider, one of America’s leading computer scientists, envisioned an “intergalactic computer network”, where people could access programs and data from anywhere.
Whilst this may have been the first suggestion of cloud computing, it didn’t really come to fruition until 2002 when Amazon entered the market with the emergence of Amazon Web Services (AWS). In the decades since then, the commercial adoption of cloud has been widespread. AWS was joined by a huge number of cloud providers, including other hyperscalers, and independent providers, including Hyve.
Milestones in cloud computing in the 2020s
In 2020, the pandemic forced a global stress test of cloud infrastructure. Remote work, video conferencing, and e-commerce all leaned hard on cloud capacity in a way that compressed years of expected adoption into months. According to an article from InfoWorld, enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services reached $65billion in Q3 of 2020 alone. Up from 28% in Q3 of 2019.
Following the public release of ChatGPT in November of 2022, AI has become the single biggest driver of current cloud market growth. AI workloads require different infrastructure compared to traditional cloud apps. Answer engines require a much larger environment to keep up with the vast amounts of power required to process the sometimes terabytes or more of data at a time.
How has cloud computing changed?
Public cloud remains the foundation of most organisations’ infrastructure, and the largest providers have kept their lead. According to Synergy Research Group, Amazon, Microsoft and Google together accounted for 63% of enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services in Q3 2025, a share that has risen steadily year-on-year. What has changed is how organisations use the cloud, and the questions they ask before committing to a provider.
The rise of managed models
Early cloud adoption was driven by the move from capital to operational spending, with pay-as-you-go pricing removing the need to buy servers and storage upfront. As environments have grown across several platforms and services, the challenge has shifted from accessing infrastructure to running it well. Configuring, securing, monitoring and optimising workloads requires specialist skills many IT teams find difficult to recruit or retain. Managed services have grown to fill that gap. Organisations can keep the flexibility of the cloud while engineers handle the day-to-day management, whether the environment runs on a hyperscale platform, or a private cloud or a combination of the two.
Concerns over lock-in and concentration
As more critical services depend on a small number of providers, regulators and businesses have looked more closely at the risks. In the UK, the Competition and Markets Authority’s cloud services market investigation found that both AWS and Microsoft hold significant market power, and that practices such as egress fees and software licensing terms can make it harder for customers to switch or use multiple providers. The AWS outage in 2025 also showed the operational side of concentration. A fault in a single region disrupted more than 3,500 organisations worldwide for around 15 hours, including financial institutions, payment providers and major retailers. For many businesses, the response has been to spread workloads across more than one environment through hybrid or multi-cloud approaches, choosing platforms based on each workloads’ requirements.
A sharper focus on data sovereignty
Organisations handling sensitive data now consider which laws and jurisdictions their data, and their provider, are subject to. Hosting your data in a UK or EU datacentre provides data residency, but it doesn’t always provide full sovereignty if the provider is subject to foreign legislation. This is increased interest in providers whose infrastructure, ownership and operations sit within the same jurisdiction as their customers.
Computing closer to the edge
Edge computing processes data closer to where it’s generated, such as a retail website, a factory floor or a network of connected devices, rather than sending everything to a central cloud location. This reduces latency for time-sensitive applications and limits the volume of data that needs to travel across a network. It is becoming increasingly relevant for AI workloads, where responses need to be delivered quickly. Edge environments generally work side-by-side a central cloud infrastructure rather than replacing it, which adds another layer to manage across an already distributed estate.
Expert opinion
“The biggest change I’ve seen isn’t the technology itself; it’s the conversations we have with customers. A few years ago, most people wanted to know how quickly they could get into the cloud. Now they want to know where their data sits, who can access it and how easily they could move if they needed to. That’s a healthy shift. Public cloud is still the right choice for a lot of workloads, but more organisations are choosing platforms workload by workload rather than putting everything in one place. Our job is to help them make those decisions and then run the environment properly once they have.”
– Luke White, Head of Sales – Hyve Managed Hosting
A look to the future
For over a decade, we have stayed ahead of how businesses host and run their infrastructure, taking on each significant shift early and building the managed expertise to support it properly. Our platform has grown from shared hosting to dedicated servers, and then to multi-tenant virtualisation and Private Cloud, with the same focus throughout: absorbing the operational complexity so internal teams can concentrate on the business.
To further enable our customers to modernise their platforms, Hyve now offers a modern, fully managed platform built on Red Hat OpenShift, enabling containerised applications and existing virtualised workloads to run side by side. It also enables customers to modernise at their own pace, reduce licensing overhead, and build an AI-ready infrastructure foundation.
Infrastructure keeps evolving, and the interesting question is always what comes next. If you are weighing up where your own infrastructure goes next, we would like to hear how you are thinking about it.
