Summary Bullets:
• Developers will face limitations on generative AI (genAI) usage.
• Agentic AI represents the largest upskilling opportunity.
GlobalData is closely following cloud trends under its new 2025 market driver category, Cloud Reconsidered. GlobalData anticipates in the new year that enterprise DevOps modeled teams will implement an entirely new approach in leveraging cloud services. The cloud is more pervasive than ever for scalability and efficiency. It’s become evident that a cloud-based IT portfolio brings the greatest promise for providing the highly critical centralized interface for development and automation platform services, which companies are seeking. This centralized management interface is more vital than ever for new challenges, which will spring up in the coming year. This is especially true for the provisioning of genAI tools, security, and management tools as well as reinforcing collaboration between development teams.
Following are a few key cloud predictions for 2025:
Developers will face limitations on genAI usage: GlobalData is seeing growing evidence that enterprises will significantly limit developers’ use of genAI in application creation and reformatting in 2025 until the industry better establishes how private data is being leveraged. As developer teams have come to rely increasingly on the use of prompt engineering to design, test, and fine tune application coding, company heads are growing increasingly uneasy about the potential loss of proprietary company data. Despite vague reassurances from large language model (LLM) providers, organizations are concerned about the release of valuable data into unknown public domains. GlobalData is already seeing a growing trend whereby corporate legal departments are beginning to issue new policies limiting the use of genAI following concerns of data leakage.
Agentic AI represents the largest upskilling opportunity: In 2025, AI agent tools bring the promise of becoming the leading upskilling and reskilling opportunity for IT workers globally in the face of an ongoing global IT skills gap. GlobalData anticipates an entirely new wave of interest among DevOps personas and high-tech workers looking to master advanced AI technology. This interest comes on the heels of wave of new agentic features released by leading cloud platform providers targeting enterprise developers. AI agents are most likely to serve as a starting point for enterprises looking to implement genAI into the app modernization process, thereby reducing tedious and time-consuming tasks.
GenAI OSS technology will advance Kubernetes deployments: Open-source software will continue to play a significant role in 2025, helping DevOps teams better navigate complex digital transformation solutions, particularly those associated with genAI. GlobalData recommends that enterprises monitor those projects receiving significant industry backing to help determine which technologies indicate the greatest promise over the coming year. These include various projects associated with key open standards bodies such as Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) growing in importance, such as K8sGPT, which helps enterprises simplify some complexities associated with Kubernetes cluster deployments and management. It uses compatible application programming interfaces (APIs) such as OpenAI API to analyze the status of container clusters to improve security and diagnostics/resolution. Another interesting project, complementary to K8sGPT is LocalAI, which can run large language models (LLMs) on users’ local hardware versus using cloud APIs. So, using the two technologies together allows enterprises to analyze Kubernetes cluster states locally. This addresses organizations’ growing concerns over exposing data to external sources, making these OSS efforts important to watch.
For more in-depth analysis on these and other cloud trends, please see: 2025 Enterprise Predictions: Cloud Reconsidered, December 27, 2024.