Strategic Intelligence: Cloud Computing in Aerospace, Defense, and Security

At the analyst, we track all themes impacting all companies across all sectors. Understanding the themes set out in this report will help you outperform your peers in 2025. The graphic below depicts our 2025 theme map. It highlights the big themes driving profits across industries and is the result of a series of interviews with senior industry executives and investors, reflecting an up-to-date view of the issues that keep them awake at night. Our 2025 theme map covers not only disruptive technology themes but also ESG, macroeconomic, and regulatory themes.

In the world of Aerospace, defense and security, our industry-specific themes focus on particular defense-related technologies, as well as trending segments of the market with the largest up-front investments in expanding production, R&D and product development. Naturally, geopolitics remains a central theme for aerospace and defense, as the core primary driver of investment and growth in this space.

Cloud is used across the ADS sector

Cloud encompasses the provision of IT infrastructure, operating systems, middleware, and applications hosted within a data center and accessed by the end-user via the internet. Documents and data stored on the cloud can be accessed more easily than traditional server storage, improving maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO), environmental, social, and governance (ESG) monitoring, and some aspects of security. According to the analyst, the total cloud computing market will be worth $1.8 trillion in 2029, having grown at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.3% from $786 billion in 2024.

Cloud will be key for coping with the data deluge

Cloud computing has transformed the way that companies operating in the aerospace, defense, and security (ADS) sector consume IT resources. This technology has enabled shared IT infrastructure and services, which create a flexible, scalable, and on-demand IT environment. In a world where companies operating in the ADS sector must deliver actionable insights from a rapidly growing volume of data, ready access to information has become a competitive advantage. Simply maintaining old IT architectures risks companies and militaries being outmaneuvered by their opposition due to slow response times.

However, despite the benefits of cloud, concerns over security and legacy systems have slowed its adoption and created data siloes, significantly undermining interoperability between business units, suppliers, and military domains. If it is to respond quickly to market disruption and emerging geopolitical threats, the ADS sector must dismantle its data siloes while maintaining the security of its systems.

Cloud enables adjacent technologies

Cloud computing provides scalable infrastructure for handling Big Data volumes, velocities, and varieties, while offering on-demand computational power and scalable storage for AI and machine learning. In IoT and edge computing, the cloud acts as a central platform for ingesting and processing device data, while complementing edge computing by managing devices and aggregating data for deeper analysis. For the aerospace, defense, and security sector, these technologies mesh together to improve situational awareness while providing flexible platforms for prototyping AI and autonomous systems.

Key Highlights

• Overview of themes: automation, visualization, connectivity, collaboration, and interpretation in the defense sector. Key technologies mentioned include drones, UAS, UGVs, UMVs, Soldier Modernizaiton, 5G, AI, LAWS, AR, VR, Digital Twins, MUM-T.

Scope

• The report details the key technoliges comprising the analyst's cloud computing framework, and their effect on the aerospace, defense, and security sectors. The physical layer, connectivity layer, services layer, app layer, and data layers represent Global Data's interet of things framework.

Reasons to Buy

• Determine potential investment companies based on trend analysis and market projections.
• Gaining an understanding of the market challenges and opportunities surrounding trending defense themes in 2025.
• Understanding how spending on these themes will fit into the overall defense market.