Current cloud computing trends
As over 25 percent of data on the internet now exists on cloud hardware, it is not something that can be ignored by business decision-makers (McKendrick, 2019). CEOs and CTOs are focused on how they can compete in the next decade with the emergence of driving insights from data. There are many notable trends in the future of cloud computing that are shifting the landscape, and a few will be discussed in the next paragraphs. These trends revolve around the themes of business usage, competition, and technologies.
Trend 1 – A.I, Machine Learning, and IoT
First, a differentiator that would enable providers to gain larger market share would be an advancement in tools for artificial intelligence, machine learning, internet of things, and codeless functions. As storage pricing across providers is a race to the bottom, these services can change the needle in an organization’s favor (Tsidulko, 2019). What does this necessarily mean and how do businesses adapt? Due to the large number of data centers, and improved storage technologies, clients can store essentially unlimited data at costs that could not be achieved had the organization selected to store the data on-premise.
If all cloud providers can allow clients to store their entire data estate onto their assets for a competitive, cheap price, then clients must find other differentiators to compare providers. Therefore, the differentiator becomes how a business can use the storage solutions and perform analytics on data to drive insights that improve decision-making abilities throughout the organization from the top to the bottom.
Trend 2 – Multi-Cloud
Another trend is the existence of multi-cloud users across the world. A common theme in this paper has been to highlight the fact that all cloud providers are not the same, and each has certain core competencies that are stronger than others. As such, businesses understand this dilemma and are using more than one cloud provider – therefore, it is prudent for architects and support staff to be trained in multiple platforms (Tsidulko, 2019).
The combination of AWS and Azure resources to be deployed in an organization is quite common – especially as the organization gets larger. More than half of the Fortune 100 companies use at least a few resources from both providers. An added benefit of this is that it reduces the reliance of an organization of their entire business operations on the shoulders of one specific company. Since multi-cloud is a common theme, there exists an entire ecosystem of companies that support cloud to cloud integration patterns.
Trend 3 – Cloud Only Options
A survey by Gartner found that by the end of this year, greater than 30 percent of IT software investments will be directed from cloud-first to cloud-only options. In other words, the current ecosystem of license-based software contracting will continue to decline – allowing software as a service providers and subscription-based models to continue to increase in revenue. Evidence of this can be seen in the fact that, while currently, 19 percent of cloud budgets are spent on cloud enablement costs, these are expected to increase to 28% by 2022, as most users and developers will be expected to be trained in cloud platforms (“Gartner Forecasts”, 2019).
Trend 4 – Open Source Technologies on the Cloud
One final trend that will be discussed is the increased focus on using open-source technologies as part of the enterprise stack. These open-source frameworks have a variety of deployment models and can range from community releases of code that are free, to more sophisticated versions of the open-source solution with added support for a cost. Both Amazon and Microsoft are leaders in pushing open source technologies to accelerate businesses transitioning to the cloud.
A recent trend of focusing on open-source tools that allow for the use of microservices is key to an organizations ability to be flexible by adapting their code to the changing needs of the customer or business. Container services such as Kubernetes and Dockers have made recent headlines in IT as excellent open-source tools to help manage, orchestrate, and administer a large number of application instances to support customers all over the world with unpredictable usage patterns.
Comments