Cloud Trends to Watch in 2025: Sustainability, Supercloud, and a Shift Beyond Edge

By many measures, the cloud computing ecosystem hasn't changed all that much in recent years. The various types of cloud architectures — single cloud, multicloud, and hybrid cloud — are well-established at this point. The same "Big Three" cloud providers have dominated the market for a long time, with no signs that this will change anytime soon. The fundamentals of cloud administration and cloud security aren't any different today than they were half a decade ago.

Yet, in more subtle ways, the cloud continues to evolve. To keep abreast of what's coming next, here's a look at five key cloud computing trends to track in 2025.

1. Cloud Sustainability Becomes More Quantifiable

Cloud sustainability has been a hot topic for some time. But traditionally, it has been difficult to quantify exactly how sustainable a given cloud platform or architecture is. Cloud providers have offered limited transparency into topics like how they source energy or how energy-efficient their data centers are.

We suspect that this will begin to change in 2025 as cloud customers demand more concrete sustainability statistics from cloud service providers. Until businesses can measure data like Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE), it will be impossible to ascertain precisely how sustainable their clouds are.

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For now, tracking data like this is challenging because cloud providers still don't generally report it, certainly not on a data center-by-data center basis. But growing expectations surrounding sustainability reporting in the new year — combined with increased interest among regulators in requiring sustainability transparency and preventing "greenwashing" — might start to change this.

2. The Edge Computing Hype Subsides

Edge computing — a type of architecture that locates some workloads near the network "edge" instead of in central data centers — has been a trendy topic for years. The general consensus has been that if you want to optimize performance (and perhaps security), you need to be strategic about using the edge.

Heading into 2025, however, edge computing seems like it may be losing some of its luster. As Gartner has pointed out, edge has struggled to mature. And while some folks are pushing what they see as new takes on the edge trend — such as deploying AI inference workloads on edge devices — those ideas seem more than a little fanciful. Your typical edge device, like a smartphone, lacks the hardware capacity to serve as a high-performing AI inference engine.

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Edge computing is not going to disappear entirely. But in 2025 and beyond, it's likely to seem increasingly less edgy.

3. Growing Interest in Supercloud

Over the past two or three years, supercloud — a cloud architecture concept that involves abstracting underlying cloud platforms and infrastructure in a way that enables a unified management layer that works across all public, private, and hybrid cloud platforms — has slowly but surely grown in popularity.

Currently, supercloud remains more of a concept than a reality, and it's unlikely that it will go mainstream in 2025. However, supercloud could well become an increasingly important trend in the new year as businesses seek more flexible approaches to deploying and managing cloud workloads.

4. Multicloud Becomes an Expectation

When the idea of using multiple clouds simultaneously became popular about five years ago, multicloud architectures were largely seen as something that was nice to have, not a necessity.

But that's changing as multicloud becomes the norm. Increasingly, businesses are realizing that using only one cloud puts them at a disadvantage. They may be missing out on important cost optimization opportunities or depriving their various teams and departments of the opportunity to use whichever cloud platforms and tools they find most useful.

For these reasons, expect 2025 to be the year when multicloud becomes an expectation, not an exception.

5. Intensifying Cloud Compliance Challenges

Compliance in the cloud has never been simple, but it's set to grow even more complex in 2025.

The major reason why is that a variety of new compliance rules, especially those that seek to regulate AI or enhance cybersecurity resilience, are in the midst of coming online. A variety of AI regulations are in the works, and new cybersecurity regulations, like DORA and NIS 2, have either recently taken effect or will do so in the new year.

For the most part, these rules don't include specific regulations that specifically target cloud computing. But they do include new requirements related to security and data privacy. This means that organizations that use the cloud will need to work harder to ensure that their cloud environments comply with the new regulations, while also continuing to meet other standards that are not so new — like the GDPR and CPRA.