Oracle recently released its 2019 top 10 Cloud predictions. The goal is to predict the future of the enterprise Cloud by 2025. Cloud technology and adoption have been transformative for many businesses, industries and products. Today’s workforce has reached a remarkable tipping point where enterprises are outpacing consumers in their adoption of emerging technologies like AI, blockchain, digital assistants, containers, serverless, and IoT.

By 2025, Oracle expects to see both Cloud providers and the enterprises they serve move toward a next-generation Cloud model where they have access to new technologies, better security, improved price performance and deep automation capabilities.

These 10 Cloud predictions that Oracle has put out explore what the enterprise IT world will look like by 2025 as the adoption of Cloud continues to rise. These predictions demonstrate both the need for a complete enterprise Cloud approach in the years to come and a future-facing view of how businesses will need to plan their move to a Cloud-native IT environment.

1. Cloud providers will offer 100% data-center replacement

Oracle’s first Cloud prediction is that second-generation Cloud providers will offer 100 percent data-center replacement. There’s an almost limitless number of ways to use the Cloud, but no matter how your journey begins, all routes eventually lead to the same destination—running your entire company in the Cloud. Oracle has predicted that by 2025, second-generation Cloud providers will offer 100% data-center replacement, but that is only possible when Cloud solutions are afforded at least the same level of reliability and performance as on-premise technology.

The first-generation Clouds were opportunistic, and the early capabilities successfully captured the market’s attention for low-risk workloads. In comparison, second-generation Cloud enables highly complex workloads and mission-critical systems. They also deliver better guarantees for security, continuity, control and price performance. Ultimately, IT organizations will have the confidence and new capabilities to completely rely on the Cloud for their mission-critical operations.

2. 80% of all enterprise workloads will move to the Cloud

The second Cloud prediction is that 80 percent of all enterprise (and mission-critical) workloads will move to the Cloud. Mission-critical applications that cannot afford to suffer any downtime are leaving the enterprise data center behind. This shift is becoming a major part of the conversation around moving enterprise IT forward in terms of efficiency and reliability. The migration of applications and workloads has created demand for a new breed of integration and migration tools that can ease an enterprise’s path to the Cloud. The considerations from moving all and critical workload to the Cloud come from its flexibility, reliability, and performance capabilities. These core capabilities of the Cloud provide the foundational infrastructure needed for all types of workloads. Critical enterprise applications will benefit the most from moving to the Cloud.

3. All applications will incorporate AI

The third Cloud prediction is that all applications will incorporate AI—further distancing themselves from legacy applications. In today’s workforce, AI is being applied in many exciting ways, like AI in HR as well as AI in finance, and it’s hard to visualize a future where it’s not an important part of every application.

Organizations are collecting more data than ever before. When that data is applied intelligently, it informs processes and provides the insights needed to work more quickly, efficiently, and flexibly. By gathering, contextualizing, understanding and acting on these huge quantities of data, AI has given rise to a new breed of applications—one that’s continuously improving and adapting to the conditions around it.

Whether AI is a sophisticated algorithm based on deep learning that can analyze product quality, or a new cognitive user-engagement paradigm for speech, vision, gesture, or touch, Oracle predicts that it will be at the foundation of all next-generation applications.

4. AI will double productivity

Oracle’s fourth Cloud prediction is that AI (and emerging technologies) will double productivity. As the volume and depth of data available to businesses grow, AI will become better at making decisions. We’ll start to see it evolve from a technology used to reduce human effort into something that can truly reduce human bias.

AI changes the productivity equation for many jobs by automating activities and adapting current jobs to solve more complex and time-consuming problems. Automation will not replace all jobs but will invent new ones. This will allow business to reduce the time it takes to complete tasks and also reduce the costs of maintenance. Companies will be able to create higher-value jobs and new engagement models while shifting resources to focus on business growth and innovation. Oracle has predicted that by 2025, the productivity gains delivered by AI, emerging technologies, and augmented experiences could double compare to today’s operations.

5. 85% of customer interactions will be automated

The fifth Cloud prediction is that 85 percent of customer interactions will be automated. Today, 89 percent of people use voice assistants for customer service, and 69 percent of enterprise customer service functions use chatbots for anywhere, anytime engagement. AI is bringing on new experiences with natural interactions, easy engagements, predictive recommendations, and friction-free journeys. Automation is quickly becoming a customer expectation across nearly all markets.

The key element for successful automated engagement is to continuously understand context and intent, no matter how the conversation naturally wanders or how an individual communicates. AI-driven analytics are helping businesses understand customer needs, IoT is bringing customers closer to companies, and digital assistants are providing humanized digital experiences. As we continue down this path, it’s easy to assume that automation of customer engagement will be extremely common by 2025.

6. The developer community will expand 10 times and productivity will increase by 400%

Oracle’s sixth Cloud prediction is that the developer community will expand 10 times and productivity will increase by 400 percent. Despite the huge growth in the number of developers working today, the demand for applications continues to outpace the supply of trained developers. The newest innovations require mastery of new technologies as well as knowledge disciplines.

Next-generation environments hide the technical underpinning and simply allow the dragging and dropping of intelligent components into an application. This visual “no-code” approach to development will allow nonprofessional developers to start to reduce the application backlog and encourage line-of-business experts to build their own solutions where necessary.

Automation will take this to the next level. Developers will be able to work in a virtual world of coding components and simulations that span the entire development lifecycle. Future programmers will be able to select software modules where they can be evaluated, assembled and debugged by using gestures and conversation. These new tools will lead to a larger and more effective development community in 2025 than ever before.

7. More than 50% of data will be managed autonomously

The seventh Cloud prediction is that more than 50 percent of data will be managed autonomously. The motivation to deliver high availability and to protect our technology ecosystems has never been stronger. The first step to ensuring higher availability is to eliminate a broad collection of maintenance activities like patching, updates and upgrades while the system is running.

For small companies with big ideas (and big companies with experimental ideas), autonomy will become a crucial factor for business continuity and low operational costs. Autonomy will enable them to bring applications online faster, cheaper and more reliably without investing in additional skills or people.

Oracle has taken the next step in extreme automation with the Oracle Autonomous Database—the industry’s first database that is self-driving, self-securing, and self-repairing. They expect that a huge portion of businesses will explore similar capabilities for data management by 2025.

8. 90% of enterprises will use a single identity platform that bridges premises and the Cloud

The eighth Cloud prediction is that 90 percent of enterprises will use a single identity platform that bridges premises and the Cloud. The Oracle and KPMG Cloud Threat Report, 2018 highlighted that the number one identity and access challenge organizations deal with today is the use of multiple identity provisioning platforms, both on-premises and in the Cloud. Over a third of respondents said that Cloud has greatly added complexity in how they can manage the real-time needs of provisioning and deprovisioning.

Organizations are starting to leverage technologies in the identity and access management (IAM) space that cross the hybrid Cloud and grant the ability to deliver a unified identity that stretches into all applications and services.

Oracle predicts that by 2025, privacy regulations that require immediate audit capabilities of users across apps and services will drive these organizations into a unified platform out of liability needs, as well as to help speed up provisioning of new apps, users and devices.

9. Automation will become the most reliable protection against security threats

The ninth Cloud prediction is that the number of security events will increase 100 times, and automation will become the most reliable way of preventing, detecting and mitigating threats. Today’s organizations face an overwhelming number of security-related events every single day, which makes prioritization and troubleshooting challenging. It’s hard for security teams to identify the real threats among all the noise of potential security events.

Oracle predicts that by 2025, malicious traffic will use AI to hide within the mass of regular and legitimate human-based traffic, and bad actors will use nonlinear techniques that inject randomness into the pattern of behavior of botnets to launch an unprecedented number of extremely difficult-to-detect attacks. They think that moving forward, organizations will also have to employ Cloud-based AI to help defend against these threats. Oracle expects that many enterprises will embrace a core-to-edge security model by 2025 to ensure that customers’ data is secure from the core of the infrastructure to the edge of the Cloud.

10.  70% of IT functions will be completely automated

Oracle’s tenth and final Cloud prediction is that 70 percent of IT functions will be completely automated. Necessary, complex and routine IT tasks take up a huge amount of time, but they have to get done. This makes them a perfect target for automation.

Oracle predicts that by 2025, automated software and hardware lifecycle management will be the norm. In a world of 100 percent managed services, SLAs will increase, and security threats will decrease. This will enable both Cloud providers and their customers to have more time to focus on improving business outcomes. For companies running entirely in the Cloud, this will be invaluable. Once all high-value enterprise processes can be attended to in the Cloud as truly managed services, businesses will have a huge volume of resources that can be reallocated to innovation projects and delivering further digital transformations.

Conclusion

Companies are moving away from asking why they should use Cloud and emerging technology and toward asking how they can get to a place where they can utilize them both. Oracle provides a simple upgrade path for customers that leverages their existing investments and skills while reducing risk and driving greater business value. Whether a customer wants to leverage the applications, platform or infrastructure services, Oracle’s mission is to support customers on their journey to the Cloud.

To learn more about Oracle’s Cloud Predictions believed to happen by 2025 and to find resources to help you get started with the Cloud, check out the full document from Oracle attached below.