The Future of Cloud Computing Key Trends to Give You a Head Start

When Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn demonstrated how “interneting” worked by sending messages from a bread truck across the Atlantic Ocean, they used the cloud symbol to represent networks of computing equipment. It happened on November 22, 1977. Forty years later, companies not only talk about implementing their projects cloud-first but also cloud-only.

“By 2020, a corporate No-Cloud policy will be as rare as a No-Internet policy today,” according to Gartner. The analyst firm also estimates the public cloud services market to register an 18% growth in 2017 compared to the previous year, approaching $250 billion. In 2018, at least half of a company’s spendings in technology will be cloud-based, IDC predicts. Cloud will account for 60% of all IT infrastructure, according to the same report.

Cloud enhances productivity and flexibility while containing costs. Hence, companies will keep joining the club. “By 2019, more than 30 percent of the 100 largest vendors' new software investments will have shifted from cloud-first to cloud-only,” expects Gartner. A year later, in 2020, “more compute power will have been sold by IaaS and PaaS cloud providers than sold and deployed into enterprise data centers.”

Back to the present, as many as 85% of organizations say they have a multi-cloud strategy, a RightScale survey found. “[W]hile hybrid cloud remains the preferred enterprise strategy, public cloud adoption is growing while private cloud adoption flattened and fewer companies are prioritizing building a private cloud,” the report reads.

Almost every mid-sized or large organization now has hybrid cloud, with plans to further expand its use, highlighting the need for a focus on integration. The future will bring more cloud integration hubs since many organizations feel that conventional data synchronizations across multiple clouds might be slow and costly.

It will also be exciting to watch the advances that will happen in the area of infrastructure orchestration and serverless infrastructure, as the new tools will be easier to use than current ones. Developers will implement more apps using serverless systems. This way, they will focus on building their products, without wasting time on complex deployment operations.

Another key trend is the IoT cloud. The major players in the industry are continuously working to expand their capabilities and provide more solutions for smart connected devices and industrial sensor systems. Decisions based on real-time data processing have the capacity to transform businesses and increase profits, so innovative companies see the potential and welcome these technologies. Cloud providers who offer an easy integration will have a head start.

One more technology on the rise is the hardware cloud, used by enterprises that prefer to deploy their own applications on servers, thus limiting their costs to processing power, storage, and the telecommunication architecture.

In the years to come, more money will be invested in cloud and new research into this area will make businesses more profitable. Cloud providers are already talking about using AI, and some even dare to imagine fully autonomous data centers, where machines do all the work, saving companies time and money. Data center technologies will push the boundaries, taking us to realms we can barely dream of today. How far the technology advances is up to us, the humans, to decide.