Top Emerging Cloud Computing Trends to Watch in Future
"Cloud Computing is empowering; companies leveraging cloud will be able to innovate cheaper and faster." - Jamal Mazhar, Founder, and CEO, Kaavo
Why is there so much noise about Cloud Computing everywhere?
Why are most businesses clamoring to adopt cloud?
The reason is that Cloud computing has emerged as the perfect solution for delivering enterprise applications. Besides, it is the ideal option for businesses looking to extend their infrastructure or launching innovations! Therefore, it comes as no surprise that 90% of companies use some kind of cloud. (Source: 451).
Currently, some of the sectors that are benefiting from the cloud are professional services, discrete manufacturing, and banking which together account for more than 1/3 of the global cloud expenditure. Each of these sectors plans to spend over $20 billion on cloud services in 2020! (Source: IDC)
What’s more? The process manufacturing and retail sector are expected to join the bandwagon of the top cloud spenders this year.
The future of the cloud sure looks exciting!
What does the cloud have on offer in the future?
Here’s a peek at some of the top trends in cloud computing expected in the future:
1. Increased Storage Capacity
With the changing demands of the global marketplace, it would not be out of place to say that data is the key ingredient for the success of any business. Businesses are looking to optimize the huge volumes of data that they produce seamlessly across cloud configurations.
In 2020, we will witness hybrid multi-cloud storage supporting the exponentially growing data across the entire data storage estate. To equip your business for the hybrid multi-cloud world, you need to ensure that your enterprise can move data from on-premises to various cloud providers and back with transparently with ease. Irrespective of the cloud environment, businesses will need to select the relevant storage option for a specific job.
As business data continues to expand at an exponential rate, hybrid multi-cloud storage will become the best option for all types of data and storage environments.
2. Rise of Hybrid Cloud
Stats reveal that hybrid multi-cloud will emerge as a dominant trend that will change the cloud landscape in 2020.
A hybrid cloud is a computing environment uses a combination of on-premise, private cloud, and third-party public cloud facilitating the sharing of data and applications between the different platforms.
Enterprises across industries are now choosing and mixing technologies and services from multiple cloud providers to get the best of both worlds. The mix of technologies and services enables businesses to avoid vendor lock-in and benefit from best-in-breed capabilities. Besides, the hybrid cloud also offers businesses the freedom and flexibility to run their workload on-premise or on different cloud platforms according to their specific business needs. A hybrid cloud also facilitates organizations to adopt common management and software development capabilities across the environment.
The trend of hybrid multi-cloud will continue to dominate in times to come. This is corroborated by the fact that hybrid multi-cloud is set to be a USD 1.2 trillion market opportunity by 2022! (Source: McKinsey & Company)
3. Hyperconverged Infrastructure
A hybrid cloud environment offers several benefits to enterprises. However, with these benefits, it also brings forth increased complexities in managing, computing, storage, etc.
Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) simplifies these complexities by facilitating the seamless integration of cloud into the environment of the enterprise. This eliminates the need to manage, compute, store, and network resources on different tiers. Instead, it integrates various resources into a single display simplifying their management.
Implementation of a pre-integrated, consolidated compute and storage resource enhances speed, increases scalability, besides improving response speeds.
As the adoption of hybrid multi-cloud increases, HCI solutions will continue to evolve to align with the needs of the hybrid cloud and are slated to become the go-to infrastructure platform for hybrid cloud.
4. Rise of Containers
Containerization has emerged as the core of an effective hybrid cloud model. This is because it provides consistency irrespective of whether the workload is deployed on-premise or on one or more clouds.
Containerization empowers businesses to maximize business value from hybrid cloud strategy by simplifying aspects such as deployment, management, and operational issues associated with hybrid cloud.
Currently, various tech giants are introducing platforms that will simplify the deployment and management of clusters. This will enable organizations to make hybrid cloud heterogeneous and workload agonistic with the result that containers will be widely adopted in the future.
5. Rise of Serverless Technology
Serverless computing is essentially a cloud-based execution model wherein functions are executed off-premises on the cloud.
Serverless technology took its baby steps in 2019 but is expected to become a strong force to reckon with, in the next few years. Stats would have us believe that by 2021,90% of the organizations that use Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) will also use some kind of serverless platform, Platform as a service (PaaS).
The rise of serverless technology can be attributed to the fact that it has the potential to transform an enterprise into a dynamic, flexible, service-oriented operational model of the future. Besides, the recent shift of enterprise application architectures to microservices and containers have also led to the need for serverless computing.
Serverless computing facilitates the expansion into the cloud with the help of serverless architecture across public and private cloud environments.
Serverless computing addresses issues such as provisioning, scaling, and management by facilitating the creation of applications that can run in the cloud and billed according to the time for which the process is running.
6. Hyper-scale Data Centers
Stats would have us believe that hyper-scale data center markets across the globe implement cloud computing that includes shared resources with foolproof security systems to protect the integrity of corporate data.
It is expected that cloud data centers will experience explosive growth as they replace enterprise web server farms with cloud computing and cloud 2.0 process computing. This is chiefly because it offers secure large computing capabilities inside data center buildings providing economies of scale that the current state of art enterprise data center standalone server technology can't match.
The driving forces for the popularity of cloud 2.0 mega data center market are:
- Cost-benefits
- Growing colocation services
- Need for data consolidation
- Mega cloud data centers deliver incredible speed at scale of entire buildings
- They are modular
- They are constantly upgraded to meet the growing bandwidth demands of the latest generation servers.
- Mega data centers are capable of performing the job of automated processes in the data center thereby enhancing the compute capacity.
- Mega data centers facilitate the automation of server and connectivity management.
- The growth of the internet has been phenomenal in the last decade. Hyperscale data centers have catered to this growth by providing processing at scale-cloud computing.
Many organizations were hesitant about migrating to the cloud because of security issues. However, this belief is a myth because the security of a shared data center can be as good or even better than that of the enterprise data center. The reason being that large independent players have implemented sophisticated systems to secure the corporate data of their clients.
It would not be out of place to say that we can expect a future where the enterprise data center will be dead. We are likely to witness enterprises migrating a workload from core enterprise servers to hyper-scale data centers that facilitate high-speed processing at half the cost.
7. AI in Data Center
The tight labor market coupled with growing demand has increased the need to build edge computing centers that are away from tier-1 locations to source technical talent. This will create a challenge for data centers in areas of recruitment and retention.
To address this issue, data center operators will leverage smart technologies and AI (Artificial Intelligence) to maximize the productivity of the existing employees. Datacenter equipment providers will be able to simplify the installation and usage of their products with the help of AI. This will enable data center operators to enhance the output with limited human resources.
8. Demand for Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service
Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) is a service that ensures the continuity of a business in the event of a disaster by replicating data and applications. The widespread adoption of cloud-based solutions by small and medium-sized businesses has propelled the growth of the DRaaS market.
As per Markets, the DRaaS market which was USD 1.72 billion in 2016 is projected to reach a whopping 12.54 billion by 2022, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 41.8% for a forecast period of 2017-2022. During this forecast period, the backup and recovery service type is expected to have the lion’s share among the various service type segments of DRaaS.
The backup and recovery service play a vital role in ensuring business continuity as it offers cost-effective, automated, and scalable solutions in the event of a disaster.
The MSP (Managed Service Provider) segment of the various DRaaS providers is expected to be the segment with the highest growth rate during the forecast period. MSPs offer businesses an avenue to offload the burden of data security and protection. They offer remote monitoring and management of the IT infrastructure for the user as a subscription model. MSPs have the technical expertise, infrastructure, and essential certifications to offer DRaaS services.
9. Edge Computing to Centerstage
Businesses of today are looking to access data almost instantly with computing resources to serve their customers. The technology that fulfills this requirement is Edge computing.
IDC defines Edge computing as a mesh of network of micro data centers that process or store critical data locally and push all received data to a central data center or a cloud center repository in a footprint of less than 100 square feet. Edge computing channelizes specific processes from data centers to points in the network that are close to users, devices, and sensors. The distributed cloud infrastructure works for hand in glove with Edge computing to fulfill this requirement. While a hybrid cloud ecosystem can be leveraged to aggregate the most relevant data and back-end functions, edge computing complements it by supporting the processing and real-time analytics.
In 2020, as the number of IoT devices increase, edge computing and hybrid cloud models will take center stage.
This is because edge computing is an essential element for the working of IoT (Internet of Things) based systems. This is because IoT based systems warrant the collection and processing of large volumes of real-time data with minimal latency level. Edge computing enables IoT systems to reduce connectivity costs by sending only important data to the cloud instead of raw streams of sensor data.
Of course, edge computing is not the final stage of cloud computing. However, it is a stage in its revolution that will soon be widely adopted across industries.
The Bottomline
All these trends in cloud computing ascertain one thing for sure, that The Cloud is out to transform every aspect of business management offering cost-effective solutions empowering businesses with unlimited opportunities to traverse new horizons!