Cloud Computing Trends and How to Stay Up to Date
The data center is evolving at a rapid pace, as a new year begins, it’s hard for CIO’s to know what to focus on, data protection, storage, cloud transitions etc. This blog will take a quick look into the current trends we believe will continue to evolve.
Hybrid Cloud Solutions become the standard.
The hybrid cloud will continue to take center stage as companies evolve into a more efficient philosophy of how to best make use of virtual resources. Even Amazon Web Services (AWS) has admitted that its full speed ahead cloud adoption strategy may require a bit of evolution into the compromise of the hybrid space.
This new philosophy brings AWS into the pack with Google and Azure Stack. Companies like IBM are also looking for acquisitions to make their hybrid strategy stronger like their recent acquisition of Red Hat for $33 billion last October. According to experts, the strongest of the big guys seems to be the HPE/Microsoft Azure alliance, although competition is heating up in the enterprise space. Gartner has predicted that 80% of infrastructures in the future will be a hybrid infrastructure.
GDPR Compliance will continue to drive technology decisions.
2019 marks the first year that companies will be required to comply with GDPR. Because of these compliance requirements, some organizations may be more hesitant to put some workloads in the public cloud than they used to be.
Comport partner Commvault recently completed a survey showing that only 12% of the 177 enterprise IT organizations evaluated understand how GDPR will affect their cloud services. Company decision makers will have to balance the need to innovate with the requirements of new regulation.
This will not limit migration to the cloud however, it will simply shift cloud strategy. In fact, IDC finds that companies spent about half of their IT budgets on cloud based services in 2018. This percentage is expected to rise to 60% of infrastructure and as much as 70% of software by the year 2020.
- PaaS will be the fastest growing cloud service, with investments growing from 32% in 2016 to 56% in 2019
- IaaS will reach a worldwide market total of $72.4 billion
Cloud services focusing on data protection will continue to rise.
The DRaaS market is another as a Service market set to explode in 2019. Cybersecurity incidents continue to make headlines and are becoming more common. Coupled with the increase in natural disasters, including the California fires and Florida hurricanes, companies are slowly realizing that they can no longer afford to ignore disaster recovery.
Traditional DR, however, is prohibitively expensive as well as hard to adapt to the current mobile workforce. It also requires continuous maintenance. This high cost of implementation and management causes many companies to lean towards cloud for disaster recovery. DRaaS provides a proactive way to keep on top of vulnerabilities, without creating extra work for in house staff, as well as provide the latest technology for your valuable data.
Automation has become crucial.
The amount of data that the average company takes in on a daily basis is far too much for an internal IT team to handle. We are seeing a trend towards automation of provisioning and cloud computing workload management to reduce the internal effort needed to manage infrastructure. Automation should be considered for manual processes and/or analysis wherever possible to increase the value your data can bring to your company as well as keep your internal teams sane!
Cloud computing skill demand is at an all-time high.
As cloud adoption grows, so too does the need for dedicated professionals to lead tech teams into the new era. Many IT teams are having trouble keeping up with the rate of innovation in the modern market. There are two major solutions to this problem: Some companies will look to a partner to help manage their cloud environments while others will look to train internally. Expertise in the cloud is at a premium today so we are seeing a trend towards external help with internal training backfill to remedy the situation immediately.
The benefits of containerization continue to be realized.
Containerization is the inherent progression of virtualization because it can focus more granularly, breaking down the operating system into chunks to be used in development and then in production. As organizations learn how to better organize and store virtual objects, data containers will become easier for them to use.
Cloud management tools will become more important.
Cloud based platforms now serve as the backdrop in a wide variety of business applications, from data sharing to project management. They are also becoming more prolific in industry specific functions including data interchange, reporting and processing big data in industries as diverse as telecom, finance, ecommerce and automobiles.
Cloud management tools enable CIOs to get a better understanding of their environment through the consolidation of many of the above functions. Putting all relevant functions together into a convenient UI also helps to limit costs. Decision makers can see precisely where departments are getting into sprawl situations, they can understand when they need new storage and identify problem areas.
The trends above are a starting point for 2019, not the finish line. We will likely see many new innovations in cloud technology as companies become more familiar with the platform and new developers enter the marketplace with new confidence.
