A few days before Thanksgiving, PR firms pitch me to tell me what their clients think will happen next year. Even after 15 years of cloud computing being a real force in IT, I’m still surprised by how naive some people are. Most people in charge of technology should know better by now.

I don’t think that there will be any tactical shifts in technology next year, like more AI in the cloud or a focus on zero-trust security. It will be more of a strategic move or a larger fix. Maybe something that has been coming for a long time, instead of just throwing money and technology at problems.

If you think back a few years, you can see signs of this emerging pattern. However, something changed the way we thought about it. That thing was a global pandemic, so most businesses ran as fast as they could to the newly found safety of public cloud providers. Just look at how quickly the cloud has grown since 2019.

Some of the business problems we’re seeing today are the result of this fast lifting and shifting to public cloud providers. This includes a lack of return on investment (ROI) from cloud deployments, which is mostly caused by poor planning, too much complexity, and not enough discipline when it comes to strategic cloud cost management, which means no finos oversight.

As we move into 2023, these seem to be the most important things. It will start a new strategic trend that might have been better off starting a few years ago.

Most businesses are having trouble with cloud computing because there are too many cloud services that need to be managed and kept track of. Again, this makes things too hard to understand, mostly because of the growth of multi-cloud.

Enterprises often move to multi-cloud on purpose, but multicolored happen a lot more often by accident as enterprises try to find and use the best cloud services without a plan for what to do with them after they are set up. This costs the business too much and doesn’t give it enough in return. An old tale.

This cloud complexity problem can be fixed by using technology more smartly and coming up with better ways to deal with the complexity. The most important thing is to cut down on duplicate work by using a common layer of technology above both public cloud providers and any legacy or edge-based systems.

This layer has common services like a single security system, a single data management system, finos, a single cloud operations system, etc. We’re not trying to solve every problem in each public cloud provider’s “walled garden.” This technology should be in a common layer, called a supercloud or meta cloud.

This strategic cloud trend not only solves the complexity problem by using common services and a common control plane, but it also helps get cloud costs under control by using an overarching finos layer responsible for budgetary tracking, fiscal management, and cloud cost reduction.

If we can solve both the complexity and cost management problems in the cloud, the ROI should take care of itself. The cloud services and new cloud-based applications that we’ve been working on for the past three years will be much better optimized, giving the business much more value.

In 2023, things will change because people will plan and do things instead of just talking about ideas. Most businesses will have to slow down to speed up. Putting in place the strategies, funding, and plans they need to finally get their cloud act together means they can use cloud computing technology better and more strategically.

If this doesn’t happen, you can be sure that boards of directors and executive types will lose their patience with spending on the cloud, which has been going on for seven to ten years with not much to show for it. It’s time to fix that and come up with a new plan for your business. I think it will start a new trend that few people saw coming.

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