Broader Trends in the Cloud Industry that shall shape the next half of 2020

In recent years, we have seen the advantages of cloud computing, from OTT platforms to data storage it has covered almost every industry. Plus the SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS have revolutionized how many IT enterprises.  Due to this, an incredible growth has been observed in this industry. Besides, all forms of cloud infrastructure, i.e. public, hosted private, and on-premises are evolved to be less siloed, hence allowing workloads to be more portable and data streams more mobile. Therefore, companies are now more open to cloud-based solutions to stay ahead in competition in businesses.

Also, according to analyst firm Gartner, the presence of in-house cloud skills will be a crucial indicator of enterprise agility, including the ability to distribute cloud services where customers want to consume them, on-premises, and on edge. Moreover, the cloud is having an enormous surge in demand in the wake of COVID-19. Cloud vendors are inclining into the cloud-filled world, responding to customer demands to integrate with other providers or lessen the security burden. Apart from that cloud provides a flexible, scalable, and on-demand IT environment. It also lifts the productivity of an enterprise.

Gartner predicts that worldwide public cloud revenue will grow to $266.4 billion in 2020, up 17 percent from $227.8 billion last year. Sixty percent of organizations will rely on an external provider’s cloud-managed service offering by 2022—double the percentage from 2018, according to the analyst firm. Meanwhile, there are some key trends to look out for in cloud computing technology this year.

Hybrid Cloud:

Enterprises are opting for more virtual operating models and infrastructure. This means they are growing to be comfortable with using third-party cloud and hosting services to support some application workloads while retaining control of other aspects, either on their premises or in a co-location facility. One of the main reasons behind this is the ability to provide control and security of private networks as well as the expansiveness and versatility of the public cloud. Therefore, to harness most benefits without worrying about slow corporate buy-in, costs of public cloud services, and better customization, enterprises are looking for optimizing hybrid cloud options. Plus hybrid cloud allows adjustment according to the business needs rather than trusting a third-party cloud computing provider.

The DevOps model:

Cloud technology breakthroughs sustain digital transformation projects through cost savings, improved efficiency, agile application development, and simplified deployment. They use modern micro-services and serverless architectures to minimize infrastructure configuration complexities. Those are primarily enabled through cloud management technologies that cohere to vital open-source software applications. With the entry of OpenStack players, the DevOps model will be further strengthened up via infrastructure integration such as security, and promote autonomy and automation.

Application lifecycle management (ALM):

Infrastructure providers are shifting up the cloud stack, beyond private or hybrid models, and into technologies that use ALM capabilities to help support a DevOps model. This shall help to coordinate the whole application and platform ecosystem of technology across the entire lifecycle. Technologies such as security and application performance monitoring (APM) play an essential role in filling out ALM solutions, also known as application and platform lifecycle management (APLM).

Containers:

As leading cloud vendors are pivoting toward packaged application solutions, container-focused strategies are becoming more popular. Kubernetes played a significant role in the trend towards orchestration and management of modernized application deployment through containerization.  These containers present the highest portability between different clouds. As a result, they play a massive role in providing companies with a channel to shift workloads between clouds, avoiding lock-in, and allowing vendor adoption based on the best fit for purpose.

So, enterprises are expanding the application and reshuffling their DevOps team around it to explore new things such as enabling serverless applications and automating data orchestration. As per the IDC, 95 percent of more new-micro services will be deployed in the containers by 2021 along with Kubernetes. The primary goal is to empower enterprises to move modern apps into production and keep pace with large-scale digital transformations smoothly via automatic software updates and ALM across various cloud computing environments.

Multi-cloud Management:

Enterprises are slowly recognizing the advantages of a vendor-agnostic approach, which not only cuts high costs but gives them the freedom to innovate. This can attract them to a multi-cloud model to assure redundancy, reducing vendor lock-in, and mitigating service disruption risks.  However, managing a multi-cloud platform that spans beyond geographical boundaries can pose a challenge. Hence treating it as a single unit or Omni-cloud might be the better solution. This is more helpful since with more portable cloud computing application, secure computation of cycles to procure in real-time, streamlining connectivity data integration platforms, and vendors form cross-platform alliances are urgent matters of the hour.