Google Cloud, as it’s now known - it dropped the ‘Platform’ in recent months - is the number three market leader, offering hosting on the same supporting infrastructure that Google uses internally for products like Google Search and YouTube.

During times of economic uncertainty, some companies become extra sensitive to costs, while others look to optimise their spend as they seek out competitive advantage during the downturn. Adopting public cloud services and infrastructure purely as a means of saving costs has long been debunked as a false economy, with many of the savings realised in the form of agility, efficiency, and optimisation, which may at some point turn into revenue gains.

With costs rising across the board, business leaders are seeking to become more savvy about their tech expenditure. It’s now well recognised that without proper oversight, cloud costs can easily spiral out of control, but reducing spend isn’t always easy. Understanding when and where to make changes to your infrastructure is what is key to maximising productivity and ROI from cloud infrastructure investments.

Digital transformation continued apace in 2022, with the public cloud helping businesses reduce the financial risk of innovation and drive agility when they need it most. A quote from Dave McCarthy, Research Vice President at IDC, sums up the sentiment of the year: "Cloud is no longer considered a location but rather an operating model for future innovation." With that in mind, here are three of the key cloud trends to watch in 2023…

While the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted businesses and the economy, one silver lining is that the event became a catalyst for rapid change and innovation within the enterprise. Across Sub-Saharan Africa, businesses were forced to rethink their operational processes and cater to staff caught in lockdowns turned to technology for solutions – and the cloud provided the answer. 2022 is the year of “big change” for the continent.

In the last few years, driven in no small part by the impact of the pandemic, cloud technology has had a profound effect on healthcare. Despite being one of the last sectors to go all-in on public cloud, the maturity of offerings seems to be finally winning the industry over, opening up significant opportunities for telemedicine and virtual care to adapt to evolving patient and workforce needs.

Driven by customer demand, automation has enabled great strides in enterprise networking. Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) has unlocked the ability for organisations to set up and tear down links between assets and scale bandwidth in real-time, matching the capabilities of the cloud. But in the back end, especially when it comes to settlement, many service providers still rely on manual processes, and this is where blockchain innovation offers much promise.

In networking, latency - sometimes referred to as 'lag' - is the delay between a client request and the service provider's response. In a cloud environment this could be a developer or end-user client request, and the cloud service provider’s response. Or for multi-cloud, it could be one application in a cloud instance, talking to another application in another cloud instance. But no matter which type, latency can have a real impact on an organisation.

Peering has come a long way since the formation of what was arguably the first settlement-free exchange of internet traffic, the Commercial Internet eXchange in Reston, Virginia, in 1991. Today there are over 600 IXs around the globe helping to peer thousands of IP networks. The internet and the technology that underpins it is a very different landscape in 2022 than it was in 1991.

At first, the benefits of public cloud adoption are clearly recognisable: newfound agility through an all-you-can-eat and on demand buffet of services, platforms, and infrastructure. But without appropriate monitoring, guardrails and process changes, this can change fast. While the perception is that cloud offers unlimited scalability and lower costs by only charging for the resources you use, the truth is that customers pay for the resources they order, whether they use them or not.