Public cloud has been the highlight of the cloud eco-system so far, and it attracts all the attention is seemingly taking away the attention of the private and hybrid cloud. However, experts predict hybrid cloud will gain importance in 2018 and beyond.

IDC estimates traditional data centers this year accounted for 62 percent of IT infrastructure spending, with 23 percent of the market going to the public cloud and 15 percent going to the private cloud. By the year 2020, data centers will drop to account for 50 percent of the market with public cloud at just under one/third of the market and private cloud capturing 20 percent.

Experts predict that Hybrid cloud strategies of major corporations such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Oracle and IBM will become clear in 2018. The coming year is set to be the year of adoption and a year to assess how much traction they will gain and what their best use cases are.

As organizations move workloads to the public cloud, they're set to gain valuable knowledge about what the public cloud is used for, and what it's not. Also, the mega-trend that's driving the entire cloud computing market is enabling application developers to innovate and create new business value as soon as possible.

Additionally, experts note as hybrid cloud computing becomes the routine in 2018 and beyond, establishing, managing and optimizing these connections will be a priority. And 2018 is also expected to be the year where private and hybrid cloud vendors talk about how to bring machine learning and AI capabilities in these environments.