2022 in review

The world we live in is vastly different from just a couple of years ago, dubbed as the “new normal” both economically and socially. The challenges of the pandemic have been replaced with new challenges of the “post-pandemic” and have been felt across businesses worldwide, and IT teams have been no exception to that.

But challenges continue to bring opportunity. The world is now one of hybrid working and hybrid systems, as businesses transform their strategies and adopting the cloud to provide flexibility and scalability. During the past 18 months we’ve seen a marked increase in the number of customers beginning their journey to the public cloud or increasing their usage.

Customers who previously leased multiple offices with datacentres located in each, started to look at downsizing their office space and reducing their footprint. For some customers this meant using the public cloud for disaster recovery and closing a secondary site, but for many this meant moving large parts of the infrastructure out to the public cloud.

For those customers who were already leveraging the public cloud there was still a substantial increase in spending and across our customer-base cloud consumption has continued to increase at an exponential rate in 2021 and 2022, and this shows no sign of changing in 2023 and beyond.

This increased usage has, in most cases, been born out of necessity of the new normal way of hybrid working and offering those services out to staff. The rush to get services up and running in the cloud to support the rapidly changing demands of the workforce has led to an increased in unplanned cost from a ballooning cloud spend bill. In this report we look at the key trends for 2023 and beyond, backed by the unprecedented events of the past 18 months and into the new normal world we now live in, reflecting the maturing needs of organisations.

Matt Hudson | Ultima Group Director