When it comes to public cloud in 2024, there’s no denying that AI has dominated the conversation, providing cloud customers with a variety of new options. In fact, a year ago, we predicted that AI would rattle some of the biggest cloud players this year, and it certainly did.
In 2025, public cloud AI offerings will continue to expand and mature, but private cloud will also thrive in the year ahead due to some complex industry dynamics that started in 2024 and will play out in 2025. Some persistent challenges will impact the public cloud market, such as supply shortages, quality concerns, and data security, pushing new behaviors for vendors and users alike.
In the past year, cloud players sought differentiation through AI infrastructure and foundation models. But FMs bring their own issues, including hallucinations and accuracy concerns. In 2025, we predict that cloud players will shift their focus to retrieval-augmented generation services as a form of differentiation. In fact, in the year ahead, every major hyperscaler will launch RAG-related solutions to build accuracy into their generative AI services.
Vendors such as Cisco, Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks, and Wiz have made significant investment into their cloud security solutions with cloud security posture management, cloud infrastructure entitlement management, infrastructure-as-code scanning, and container security functionality sets, as well as centralized and generative AI-supported policy management, detection, response, and reporting.