The evolution of cloud computing over the past decade continues to open up endless opportunity for innovation. This together with the fact that it is scalable, robust and cost-efficient means that it is unsurprisingly set to remain a key investment component on the digital roadmap for most organisations.
Considering that according to research 1 it is estimated that 83% of enterprise workloads will be in the cloud by 2020, a number of key trends have emerged that businesses looking to prepare for, and maximise, their IT spend, and ROI should be taking note.
1. IoT and the increased adoption of edge computing
The distributed infrastructure brought about by cloud computing is considered one of its main advantages. Organisations that require instant access to data and computing power to serve their customers are increasingly opting for edge computing which assists IoT technologies to process large amounts of data in real-time together with low latency levels.
IoT systems benefit from moving intelligence to the edge thereby reducing latency, rapidly increasing information processing and allowing for quicker decision making. This also effectively leads to lower connectivity costs which is a secondary, but very important driver.
A good use case in this instance, is sensor-enabled equipment in a manufacturing environment, which analyses and filters the data prior to sending it to the cloud, thus freeing up cloud infrastructure resources.
2. Uptake of public cloud will increase hybrid cloud usage
Increased scalability and reduced cost are some of the most compelling reasons seeing an increasing number of enterprises turning to the public cloud.
By making use of both public and private cloud within one architecture, the hybrid cloud model allows companies the option of managing their own private cloud for sensitive data and applications and utilising the public cloud for other general computing functionality. This allows access to the benefit of custom scalability as and when additional resources are required.
3. Increased automation through AI
Organisations across industry sectors are increasingly looking to the enhanced machine learning, pattern recognition and intelligent robotics capabilities brought about by artificial intelligence (AI) to algorithmically solve problems and automate manual processes.
IT environments undergoing digital transformation spanning multiple technology types face complexity, speed and scale challenges. Many IT operations experience difficulty manually managing the current infrastructure while dealing with the amount of data that is required to be retained (which is exponentially increasing), as well as the added challenge of having to respond with speed to ever increasing problem incidents.
Owing to the fact that the datasets involved in this are too vast for traditional computing solutions and are increasingly becoming unstructured, cloud computing remains a central enabler of AI technology solutions whose real-time and predictive insight capabilities are essentially all generated from the cloud.
4. Blockchain technology
When it comes to cloud, its naturally decentralised infrastructure and scalability, makes it an ideal hosting solution for blockchain technologies. And while it is already being harnessed by various fintech organisations for cryptocurrency analysis and validation, going forward its use and application will not be limited to the financial sector.
Although it is set to remain the preferred hosting solution for initial coin offerings (ICOs), an increasing number of companies outside of the financial sector are looking to make use of blockchain technologies to bring servers into the cloud, conduct large scale data analysis, build custom applications and produce tangible outcome based results.
5. Serverless computing
Serverless computing effectively means outsourcing the entire infrastructure to the cloud. The increasing number of open source solutions in this space is predicted to see a marked uptake of serverless computing across the industry in the near future.
6. Upsurge in open source usage
A growing number of organisations are integrating open source solutions into their IT operations, with many even building whole infrastructures around it. The ecosystem created by cloud computing provides the perfect environment to host open source. As organisations continue to migrate their operations to the cloud, open source is predicted to be a key trend in IT innovation beyond 2020.
All things considered; cloud is most definitely here to stay. It is scalable, robust, and cost-efficient, allows for increased efficiency, improved agility, and allows endless opportunities for growth and innovation. In addition, the demand for enhanced customer experience means that cloud services are increasingly becoming the go-to hosting solution for organisations seeking to seamlessly provide personalised, on-demand services in line with their customers’ heightened omnichannel expectations.
At BCX our most important customer is yours, which is why we’re opening this unmatched world of agility and new degrees of customer experience by taking businesses to the cloud.
For us, cloud adoption is, and will undoubtedly remain, a key requisite for enterprises looking to scale and innovate as a means to not only securing competitive advantage, but also re-inventing the customer experience.