Cloud computing has gained significant traction ever since it came into the limelight. However, the current pandemic has further pushed the adoption. Businesses are now looking for ways to survive the crisis, and there’s no better option than cloud computing. That’s precisely why the cloud computing market at USD 317.4 billion in 2020 is expected to grow to a whopping USD 832.1 billion in 2025 (Source: MarketsandMarkets).
Key Accelerators for Cloud Adoption
Cloud computing has already become a key part of numerous businesses, regardless of the industry. But the recent pandemic has caused a significant shift in how organizations operate. This quick shift has further accelerated the adoption of the cloud in 2021. Some primary key accelerators that we can see in today’s business world are:
Need to refocus digital efforts toward changing customer expectations
Stringent lockdowns and most of the workforce working out of the home have increased the consumer adoption of digital channels that have raised the priority businesses to give to digital transformation efforts. There has also been a rise in first-time users of digital channels for leveraging business services. Considering the US alone, the banking sector saw around 21% first-time digital users (Source: McKinsey) while the entertainment industry placed them at 24%, grocery at 31%, and apparel at 13%.
Needless to say, all related industries had to step up their digitization efforts to stay afloat in times of uncertainty. Digital shift without cloud adoption is not optimized hence the evident need for an increased cloud adoption rate.
US consumers are accelerating adoption of digital channels, a trend seen across global regions
Need to relook at customer journey to identify points of health risk and design a contactless experience
While most operations have gone digital, some industries need the consumers to be physically present at the venue to leverage the services. Primary examples of such scenarios are in the hospital and travel industries. Hence, they have to relook the customer journey to identify the potential health risk touchpoints and eliminate them to provide a safe contactless experience. For instance, the travel industry can use robots to sanitize every touchpoint (planes or hotel rooms), digitize hotel services (bookings, payments, etc.), and provide touch-free end-to-end journeys.
For providing such a contactless experience, CIOs had to make a move to digital-first models. They wanted a scalable and agile IT infrastructure that can enable them to make quick alterations in their daily operational model, which is better than the cloud for scalability and agility.
Illustrative customer journey with ideas for mitigating risks
Ability to Use Data and Artificial Intelligence
Data has become the new oil fueling the growth of businesses. But with a significant functional, operational, and economic shift caused due to the pandemic, the old data needs to be reevaluated. It means the enterprises need relatively new data with an ability to gather, store, and use it for the benefit of their consumers and employees. Artificial Intelligence (AI) provides the perfect opportunity to use data and create it. For instance, several prominent industry leaders have started using advanced Machine Learning algorithms such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to create synthetic data.
But to produce, store, analyze, and use such a massive amount of data requires agile and scalable servers. Hence, there is a need to initiate the efforts to implement core models that can scale on the go to drive efficiency. As CIOs are looking to deploy such tech stacks and infrastructure, cloud computing and agile, automated software-delivery pipeline, also known as continuous integration and continuous delivery, has gained a lot of traction. While there are still other ways to implement such stacks, the cloud offers to make these changes relatively quicker and at low costs.
The cloud offers numerous benefits ranging from reduced IT costs to scalability to continuity and efficiency. On top of it, the cloud also has the potential to enable a genuinely remote workforce while ensuring business agility, which has become the new norm due to the pandemic. With the endless benefits and the shift to the boundary-less workforce, it is expected that we will be witnessing the continued growth of cloud computing along with several new trends. . Here are some cloud trends to watch for in 2021.
Hybrid Cloud/Multi Cloud will Accelerate.
One of the most significant cloud computing trends that we will witness is the hybrid cloud’s growth. According to an IDC report, 90% of enterprises worldwide will rely on a hybrid cloud strategy, and why not? Hybrid cloud offers the best of all worlds: on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud. Thus it helps the IT managers efficiently manage workloads across multiple clouds to meet all the requirements and maximize resilience.
The hybrid cloud/multi cloud model gives enterprises enhanced control, speed, and scalability benefits. With a hybrid infrastructure, IT managers have the option to select which workloads they want to run in which environment. They also have the availability of multi cloud environments to divide, deploy, and run multiple workloads and instantaneous speed. On top of it all, they also have numerous instances available that enable them to scale at ease without incurring any business downtime.
Edge Computing will Prevail.
Edge computing is no more a future technology, but it certainly is one of the latest trends in cloud computing. According to a Redhat survey, enterprises will be spending around 30% of their IT budget on edge computing. It represents a data model where a small amount of data is stored and processed locally before sending it to a centralized storage location.
The growth and popularity of the Internet of Things (IoT) will play a vital role in increasing edge computing adoption. IoT devices can collect critical data but cannot store and process it by themselves. Edge computing enables IoT devices to process data locally to provide quick outputs and results. With the ability to store and process data locally to reduce throughput and enhance efficiency, edge computing is a cloud computing trend to look out for and adopt in the coming years.
Public Cloud Adoption will Skyrocket.
By forcing organizations to go remote, the novel coronavirus has given a boost to cloud usage. It made several ventures to adopt cloud without having the need to know about the technology. Businesses found significant public cloud providers like Azure, AWS, and GCP (Google Cloud Platform) as reliable options, which led to increased adoption in the public cloud.
Going by the stats, Gartner predicts public cloud spending to grow by 18% in 2021. On the other hand, Forrester predicts the global public cloud infrastructure market to grow by 35% to reach USD 120 billion in 2021. Similarly, several other predictions and stats clearly hint at this cloud computing trend of continuous public cloud adoption.
Serverless Computing will Continue to Grow.
With around 50% of AWS users moving to AWS Lambda (Source: datadoghq.com), serverless computing was already a cloud computing trend in 2020, and it will continue to be so in 2021. Serverless brings the ease of Function as a Service (FaaS), allowing software developers to deploy functions on the cloud as and when required. It eliminates the need for adopting and managing complex infrastructures to implement processes on different cloud platforms with different viewpoints.
Virtual Desktops will Gain Momentum.
Virtual desktops, VDI or Desktop as a Service (DaaS), will significantly become popular and adopted, with remote working becoming the new norm. DaaS allows authorized personnel to access desktop images hosted on the data center from anywhere and any device.
Its centralized structure and ability to provide remote access to critical data and applications securely will undoubtedly bring this desktop virtualization technology to the limelight. Thus, adopting technologies like Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) & Desktop as a Service will rise in 2021, making it a worthy future trend in cloud computing. Even the statistics hint at its growing adoption. Gartner forecasts that DaaS will grow at a CAGR of 58.8% between 2019 to 2023.
Data Security and DRaaS Patterns will Change.
Regardless of the cloud, data security will become paramount in 2021. Cybersecurity breaches are constantly rising, and attackers are becoming more innovative than ever. With the increased adoption of the cloud, it is evident that even these data breaches will continue to grow. Thus it will be a necessity to leverage Managed Security Services from experts.
Along with data security, even Disaster Recovery as a Service solution will witness a change. Due to the current pandemic, several businesses realized that their on-premise DRaaS solutions are obsolete. Thus many organizations will be looking to move their DRaaS solutions to the cloud, making it a primary cloud computing trend.
Final Words
These cloud computing trends will completely revolutionize our daily operations. With these future trends in cloud computing coming into effect, businesses will also have to transform themselves and be prepared to embrace them. There’s no denying that with such fast-paced changes and new cloud computing trends, the cloud landscape after a few years will be completely different from what it is today. The best way to prepare for these trends is to partner with a certified vendor like Cloud4C. Whatever your cloud computing needs are and for whichever cloud platforms, we have got you covered. With the right set of tools, expertise in cloud computing, and over a decade of experience, we provide end-to-end cloud services. got you covered. With the right set of tools, expertise in cloud computing, and over a decade of experience, we provide end-to-end cloud services.
