Cloud computing technology was what we relied on during the global pandemic. Remote workforces supported global supply chains with the help of the cloud. The greater the organization’s scalability needs, the more it will prioritize the implementation of cloud technology. Business continuity and cost efficiency may rely on Cloud in 2021, even more than it did in 2020.
What Experts Say?
Dustin Milberg is a field chief technology officer for cloud services at InterVision. He maintains that repercussions of covid will keep resonating in 2021, and businesses will have to expand cloud implementation for increased agility, improved accessibility, and sound flexibility. But to leverage properly he suggests seeing the cloud as a destination instead of a journey.
“This is because simply ‘getting to the cloud’ doesn’t automatically mean you’ll see improved performance and spending. Instead, the cloud is an iterative process of optimization and creating security by design to match your company’s goals, both now and in the long term.” Dustin says.
Steve Miller-Jones, vice president of edge strategy and solution architecture at Limelight Networks has the same opinion. He maintains that the paced decentralization of workplaces in the last year has multiplied the complexity of technologies.
“At the same time, exciting new technologies are making it easier to instantly generate, process, and analyze data for better business performance. These operational demands are shifting how businesses leverage cloud computing.”
Let us take a look at seven ways cloud computing technology may evolve in the coming year.
- Unbelievable Growth Rates
Forrester (Cambridge, Mass.-based market research company) says that the Cloud has taken the position of center stage in pandemic recovery. The global public cloud infrastructure market will increase by 35% to $120 billion in 2021.
In its “Predictions 2021” report, Forrester says, “The aggressive move to cloud, already proceeding at a healthy clip before the pandemic, will spike in 2021, yielding even greater enterprise adoption, cloud provider revenue and business value.”
The Stamford, Conn.-based research and advisory firm Gartner say that global public cloud spending will grow 18 percent next year to $304.9 billion, up from $257.5 billion this year. Sid Nag, the research vice president at Gartner says that pandemic has validated the value proposition of cloud and cloud adoption is the new normal as the use of public cloud services continues to escalate.
Software as a service (SaaS) is expected to grow approximately 16 percent to $117.8 billion. It still will be the largest market segment for end-user cloud IT spending. The expected growth rate of application infrastructure services (PaaS) 26.6 percent to about $55.5 billion, as per Gartner. When it comes to cloud system infrastructure services (IaaS) spending, it is 26.9 percent to $65.3 billion.
- The New Cloud is The Edge
Yes, and new edge vendors are going to trim five points from public cloud growth next year, according to Forrester. They said that new businesses that support the deployment of the Edge, will appear in 2021.
Dell, HPE, IBM, Intel, and other large scale vendors are strengthening their bond with Edge in assistance of cloud-like solutions that are deployable anywhere. Content delivery networks are offering edge computer services across thousands of local points of presence. Forester thinks that buyers will shift their cloud strategies toward the Edge, over the next three years.
Miller-Jones thinks that developments in serverless computing models and the creation of distributed service layers around the cloud now power real-time IT applications. He said, “Integrating a distributed edge strategy within a broader cloud computing effort is key to continued innovation in 2021. Environments at the network edge that scale when needed, are instantly accessible and that is consumed as a service are key developments in this new paradigm.”
He also expects more emphasis on enterprise network edge security and protecting users, services, applications in 2021. It is because data as enterprises embrace distributed application environments.
- A reshuffling of Three Big Cloud Providers
Forrester predicts reshuffling of the top three public cloud providers in 2021. China’s Alibaba may displace Google Cloud and hold the third position spot for revenue in the global public cloud infrastructure market. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft will fill the first two positions.
The revenue of Google Cloud increased to $3.44 billion, compared to $2.38 billion in the same quarter last year. That includes sales from not only Google Cloud Platform but also Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) productivity tools and other enterprise cloud services.
Hyoun Park, CEO and chief analyst at Amalgam Insights says, “Google (Cloud) establishes itself as an enterprise-friendly cloud as the work it has put into ERP (enterprise resource planning) workloads, analytics and account management pay off in 2021.” Amalgam Insights is a technology advisory firm in Berkeley, Calif. They expect Google Cloud to achieve forty-plus percent growth this year.
- Multi-Cloud And Joint Cloud Provider Offerings
Providers have now realized that they can partner to accelerate go-to-market launches and capitalize on mutual strengths. So hopefully, we will see the start of multi-cloud and joint provider cloud offerings next year.
Hyoun Park says that the idea of cloud platform being the only platform that the company uses, intimidated the cloud providers throughout the 2010s. But now the scenario is changing. Multi-cloud environments have started to develop and the competition between massive cloud markets is getting tough. Cloud vendors will have to reconsider all their approaches.
- Artificial Intelligence Engineering
In its “Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2021” report, Gartner says that organizations need some solid artificial intelligence engineering strategies. Otherwise, their AI projects may fail.
Issues in scalability, maintainability, and governance often cause AI projects to collapse. However, a strong AI engineering strategy can help resolve them. It enables organizations to deliver the full value of AI investments.
Gartner said, “Without AI engineering, most organizations will fail to move AI projects beyond proofs of concept and prototypes to full-scale production.”
Gartner further clarifies that it is AI engineering that makes AI a part of mainstream DevOps processes. In other cases, AI will merely be a set of specialized and isolated projects.
- Automated Cloud Orchestration and Optimization
The complexity level of proper management of both quantity and quality of interconnected services across applications and services is overwhelming the IT organizations. That is why Park argues that cloud platforms will continue to develop automated cloud orchestration and optimization.
- Perfect Storm of Data Privacy and Cloud Migration
The term ‘Perfect Storm’ is used by Balaji Ganesan, co-founder, and CEO of Privacera. He is a data governance and security solution provider and co-founder of Apache Ranger. In 2021, the combo of the global pandemic and an increase in cloud infrastructure will create the “perfect storm” for data governance and compliance.
He said, “In 2021, data governance will become an ever more prevalent topic for CIOs, CISOs, and CDOs to ensure responsible use and availability of cloud data.”
To ensure secure data migration to the cloud, organizations will keep initiating new relevant projects. What secure data migration means is to encrypt all data required by the enterprise data governance team before their IT or data teams are allowed to move data from on-premises to the cloud.
Utilizing his sassy imagination, Balaji Ganesan introduces another interesting term, which is “wild west of information sharing.” Next year’s horizons will witness its end.
Countries are now following the lead of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). We can predict that the Regulatory legislation around the world will progress in the direction of increased control of personally identifiable information (PII) data to safeguard consumer privacy.
“The latest politicization of coronavirus data combined with the manually and bot-assisted dissemination of information and misinformation based on personal data leveraged out of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter portends the end of the ‘wild west’ of personal information on the internet and will begin a new era of consumer privacy,” said Ganesan.
