The Future of Cloud Computing Adoption will be Reinforced.

Cloud Computing will take the centre-stage by powering the pandemic recovery in 2021. Cloud will power how the organizations will adapt to the “New Norma,” that is still unstable. The workplace impact due to the global Pandemic has reinforced the tremendous value and need for cloud computing to the workforce and the world’s economy. Without the cloud applications, tools and services, Businesses and Enterprises couldn’t have sent millions of workers home, maintained global supply-chain, or shifted entire industry business models in a matter of weeks. 

The rush to cloud computing during the Pandemic exposed stark contrasts between organizations that embraced the cloud infrastructure/technologies and those who have resisted or under-invested in them. The aggressive move to cloud technologies is already underway and is sure to the spike in 2021, resulting in even greater enterprise adoption. Covid-19 has forced companies to prioritize customer experience and speed over efficiency and cost-savings. Previously it was predicted that the public cloud infra market would grow by 28% to reach, $113 billion in 2021. Let us understand the Future of Cloud Computing and what is in store for the organizations at large:

  1. Hyperscale Public Cloud Market return to Hypergrowth:  No one yet knows how far into 2021 we all will continue to work from home, avoid air travel or primarily shop online. But it is crystal clear that every enterprise should become more agile, adaptive, and responsive than ever before. Even before the Pandemic reared its ugly head, the adoption of IT infrastructure was dropping, and companies were riding heavily on general cloud services. However, in the mid-pandemic, the major four largest public cloud clouds maintained a very strong revenue growth (Alibaba – 59%; Microsoft Azure – 47%; Google Cloud – 43%, and AWS – 29%) respectively as the companies accelerated and enabled cloud migrations by releasing new apps to meet the fast-changing consumer demands. Therefore, it is now being predicted that the global public cloud infrastructure market will grow by 35% to $120 billion in 2021. The businesses will see a steep decline in the traditional IT infrastructure and significant growth for Infrastructure automation and hyper-converged infrastructure. 
  1. Hybrid or Multi-Cloud Strategies: There will open a myriad of business opportunities for Multi-Cloud Strategies and will lead to a break-down of barriers among the providers. Today, the top public cloud providers such as the Microsft, Amazon, and Googles’ of the world provide ‘Garden Walled,’ approached services. Their business models involved promoting their platforms as one-stop-shop covering the entire organizations’ cloud, compute, and data requirements. However, in practice, the industry is increasingly moving towards ‘Hybrid or Multi-Cloud’environments with requirements for cloud infrastructure to be deployed across multiple models. An open collaboration amongst the big cloud providers for creating bridges between their platforms. This business model works contrary to their current one, which is reliant on an ability to upsell greater cloud capacities with additional services as their customer’s scale. Adopting a collaborative approach enables the customer to take greater advantage of the rapidly growing multi-cloud model. Still, it also benefits businesses needing to share data and access with its Partners in their supply chain, which may all be working across diverse data-standards and applications. It is also space where we will see growing levels of innovations from the ecosystem partners developing services that simplify the process of operating between different public cloud platforms. Above all, the Hybrid or Multi-cloud strategy will reduce single vendor dependency or cloud solution where they often find themselves being locked in contracts. There will also be a growing demand for “bare metal” cloud space – raw storage and compute power where businesses can simply “lift and shift” their existing systems into the cloud without having to adapt them to run on pre-installed software or services. The need to consolidate these user requirements will be a driving force behind the direction in which cloud services evolve throughout 2021.
  1. Serverless Technology and Container Platforms: For more than a decade, bespoke software development has been solely dependent on systems that uses servers as computing capabilities and as storage sort and analyze or share data. Many software companies purchased their own servers to modify their computing capacities based on their ever-changing business needs. However, the recent advancements in cloud computing technology have transformed these physical servers into virtual machines. By virtualizing the computing resources of physical servers, virtual machines enable highly efficient implementation of cloud computing technologies into multi-tenant environments.  In the current times, the enterprises are increasingly relying on serverless computing as it offers space to work on core products and services without the need to operate or manage servers. The technology is set to move from a niche option to mainstream in 2021. Besides, in a cloud computing environment, there is no shifting back from the virtualized deployment or container orchestration. Containers further simplify deployment, management, and operational issues associated with the hybrid cloud. The significant growth of the hybrid cloud is expected to be a considerable rise in the deployments of the containers and are expected to remain key growth areas in 2021.
  1. AI in Data Centre: AI is the underpinning technology which will revolutionize Cloud Computing Capabilities and IT Infrastructure. Advancements in AI-based solutions and services will continue to work in tandem with the growing deployments both in private and public clouds. AI as a service will significantly improve the existing cloud services and augment their applications. Globally the Data centres are witnessing the increasing use of AI to solve critical business issues proactively. As the IT infrastructure and operation skill gaps widen, AI will play a vital role in automating various tasks. Subsequently, AI will help data centres to learn from past data and distribute workloads across the organization more efficiently through the cloud. Cloud will continue to leverage these revolutionary toolsets to become more widely deployed by the enterprises of all sizes and in all fields, leading to increased efficiency and productivity.  Smart City Infrastructure, Autonomous Vehicles, and Pandemic response planning are all fields of research and development where the effect of smarter algorithms delivered through cloud-enabled services will be felt. Machine learning will also play a big part in the logistic processes that keep cloud data centres up and running. Networks of hardware, cooling systems, and power usage in these delicate and expensive environments can all be managed and monitored by AI algorithms to optimize running efficiently and minimize their impact on the environment. R&D in this field is likely to gain momentum leading to breakthroughs in the data centre efficiency and speed. 

To summarize, affordability of cloud architecture will move up the priority. As a result, cloud leaders are placing their focus on ramping up investments in their native security offerings. Stakeholders across cloud-management providers are likely to follow suit and acquire security capabilities beyond past identities. In the coming years, IT infrastructure and Cloud Computing solutions will need optimization to become more cost-effective. With the significant transition of SME businesses to cloud environments, cloud providers will need to differentiate their offerings to help these organizations choose affordable cloud architecture that will deliver desired outcomes in their overall performance.