Amit Gupta, who is the co-founder and CEO of Rapyder Cloud Solutions, is a new-age technology specialist, who has rich experience in cloud technology, both in India and the US. He leads the team in driving Rapyder’s brand and value proposition and is responsible for the delivery strategy, operations, and the organization’s business growth too. Amit has the expertise and experience in architecting, strategizing, and executing cloud and digital transformation projects. He has worked in both leadership and technical roles in his previous tenure besides have entrepreneurial experience as well.
On the future of cloud computing trends, all IT experts agree that it will be at the forefront of all technologies to solve major business challenges. This is evident with enterprise cloud spend increasing at a 16% CAGR between 2016 and 2026, it is safe to say that businesses are no longer looking at the cloud solely as a tool. The focus is now more on leveraging cloud security to accomplish different business goals.
As per a report, by the year 2021, around 83% of company workload will be stored in the cloud as a growing number of companies continue to move from private to public cloud.
“Revenue from the public cloud sector is expected to grow to $331 billion by 2022 from $175 billion in 2018” – Gartner. To understand the future of cloud computing, here are the top ten trends of this technology.
Hybrid/ Multi-Cloud Solutions
Hybrid cloud computing refers to using a combination of the private cloud as well as a third-party public cloud service. It is primarily used to allow workloads to move between private and public clouds, giving users more flexibility with their computing needs. With its multiple benefits, the market size of hybrid/ multi-cloud is expected to grow to $97.64 billion by 2023. In fact, tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon are already investing heavily in this technology as a product. Hybrid/multi-cloud provides enhanced security features, SaaS capabilities, consistent server reliability, customizable capabilities, and top performance. But what makes it so desirable is the flexibility it offers and its reduced cost, making it fit for even growing businesses.
Backup And Disaster Recovery
Cyberattacks, data outages, and system failures are a part and parcel of running a business these days. Most businesses have dealt with their servers crashing, leading to the loss of critical data files. To ensure such issues don’t damage the organization and its processes, backup and disaster recovery have become a trending use case of the cloud. If Spiceworks reports are to be believed, 15% of the cloud budget is allocated to Backup and Disaster Recovery, which is the highest budget allocation followed by email hosting and productivity tools. The cloud basically brings together two operations – backup and recovery. Now, this recovery solution allows for easy retrieval of lost data in case an error occurs or the server crashes. Microsoft reports that data loss and cyber threats are at an all-time high. In the event of a security breach or data loss, a CIO needs their organization to have a recovery plan that ensures no critical process is impacted.
Serverless Architecture
A serverless architecture removes all barriers that a standard IT infrastructure would usually bring. Users don’t have to purchase or rent the servers that they run their data on. Instead, a third party will handle it all for you, allowing your organization to tackle other tasks. The advantages of a serverless architecture are plenty- easy operational management, no system administration, reduced liability, reduced costs, and better offline experience, to name a few. The rise of the sharing economy actually brought serverless architecture to life in the cloud computing industry. Its cost-effectiveness is what makes it a trend this year.
AI Platform
As technology advances, one of the most common cloud computing trends to look forward to is AI. Tech giants are now looking into incorporating AI to process big data to improve their business functioning. By using artificial intelligence, computing platforms are increasing their efficiency. It now offers organizations the ability to automate and manage their processes intelligently. The framework also allows them to easily scale and adapt to the changing needs of the business. Simply put, AI is definitely a cloud computing trend to watch out for as it enables smoother organization workflows and increased efficiency.
Cloud Security
Data theft, leakage, and deletion- security is a big challenge even for traditional IT infrastructures. But, with more companies moving to cloud platforms, it’s important to ensure that cloud service providers can create an airtight security system to guarantee the safety of their client’s data. Cloud security is not just a trend in cloud computing this year, it’s a necessity that is prioritized by every organization.
IoT Platform
With a hyper-connected world, one of the most popular cloud computing trends is the rise of IoT platforms. A study by Gartner suggests the number of connected things in use will be going up to 25 billion by 2021 from 14.2 billion as of 2019. An IoT platform is a cloud-enabling platform that works with standard devices to enable cloud-based applications and services on it. IoT functions as a mediator, collecting data from different devices with a remote device configuration and smart device management. The technology is self-management and sends out real-time alerts to troubleshoot issues. IoT also supports different industry-grade protocols to deliver smart predictions through monitoring organization processes.
Edge Computing
It is a method of optimizing a cloud computing network system by performing data processing at the edge of the network, near the source of the data. It works real-time on the cloud servers to process less time-sensitive data or store data for the long term. That means with the continued convergence of IT and telco, 2019 will bring edge computing at the forefront, creating a huge array of new opportunities for organizations to use new technologies and computing power. With IoT devices being on a massive increase, edge computing will play a chief role in providing real-time information & data analysis and streamline the flow of traffic from IoT devices.
DevSecOps
Cloud computing services provide users with a seamless and simple experience in managing their data but there are many security risks involved. The security risk of cloud computing includes network eavesdropping, illegal invasion, denial of service attacks, side-channel attacks, virtualization vulnerabilities, and abuse of cloud services. Companies see data security as a major challenge in cloud computing, making them hesitant to use the service. That’s where DevSecOps comes in. DevSecOps is the process of thinking of infrastructure security from the start. It works on automating core security tasks by embedding security controls and processes into its workflow. The future of cloud computing heavily relies on ensuring users have a security system to work with and DevSecOps is one of the best ways to make the cloud unbreakable.
Service Mesh
Since cloud platforms are complex, it is critical to ensure that the platform has a fast and safe communication environment. With a service mesh, users have a dedicated layer for service-to-service communication, making their cloud platform highly dynamic and secure. The service mesh is a critical component in a cloud platform. As cloud ecosystems grow and are adapted to fit the changing needs of users, a service mesh can fill the different requirements that come up from service identity to access various policies within the cloud platform.
Open Source
This industry is moving towards a path of innovation and collaboration. With this shift in how cloud services are managed, many organizations are looking at adopting an Open Source cloud computing service for their business. Open-source cloud is a service that is built with software or technology that can be customized by anyone. Simply put, an open-source cloud platform allows businesses to customize the infrastructure based on their specific needs.
With a technology platform that is open-source, businesses can see multiple benefits. They can quickly scale their cloud infrastructure, adding features is much simpler than with a closed-source platform, and there are fewer security concerns. The tech industry is moving to a collaborative work environment and opting for an open-source cloud computing service seems to be the right direction for new businesses or ones that are scaling. This is why many experts claim that open source is actually the future of this technology.