In January, Carla Arend, Rahiel Nasir and Luis Fernandes presented IDC’s predictions for cloud in 2026 and beyond. Below is a summary of the main points that were made in the webcast.
The need for digital resilience has never been more crucial
- Tariffs, supply chain glitches, regulations, skills shortages… digital organisations are being assaulted from all sides.
- For the majority of EMEA organisations, maintaining operational resilience and cyber security is the top priority.
- To survive, organisations need to ensure their tech stack is robust and assess the strengths of their tech partner ecosystem. Adaptability and financial stability will also be key weapons to add to the armoury.
Digital sovereignty could help
- Around half of organisations in EMEA have increased interest in implementing digital sovereignty solutions due to all the geopolitical uncertainties, such as trade tensions, regional conflicts, and regulatory shifts, witnessed in 2025.
- Digital sovereignty solutions offer data owners complete control and autonomy over their digital assets – maintaining operational resilience is a key tenet of sovereignty.
- Governance, risk and compliance solutions will be the key focus for organisations looking for sovereign cloud providers, especially for their AI. This will help them reassess their cloud provider options, determine the right IT venue for their workloads, and help to create a more robust tech stack.
The right venue for AI workloads
- Enterprises are shifting to specialized AI providers and edge infrastructure to maximize performance and efficiency.
- By 2028, physical AI use cases will experience explosive growth with cloud providers powering the bulk of these deployments at the edge with industry-specific AI agents and high-performance edge infrastructure.
- By the end of this decade, at least 30% of advanced GPU needs will be met by specialised AI cloud providers offering true cloud features, flexible pricing, APIs, and software services (unlike GPU-only providers).
AI and cloud modernisation
- Cloud modernisation continues while legacy systems are re-platformed for AI, using autonomous agents to automate operations and orchestration.
- Over the next two years, more than half of enterprise apps will leverage SaaS platforms to orchestrate predefined app functions and AI agents for real-time workflows, enabling modular and interoperable solutions.
- By 2030, 45% will use cloud AI-infused tools to assess cost and performance metrics to optimise workload placement. Furthermore, a fifth will use AI agents to automate workload orchestration.
Recommendations for cloud users
- With geopolitical turmoil continuing into 2026 (and probably beyond), organisations are advised to take a risk-based approach to their cloud and AI strategies.
- Choose the most appropriate venue for your workload. This should be supported by a hybrid and multicloud ecosystem of partners who offer services tailored to your needs.
- The time to modernise your cloud estate to get ready for AI is now.
Watch the European cloud predictions webcast here:
For the EMEA FutureScape predictions webcast, click here.
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