Cloud and Beyond: The Future of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing and cloud storage have generated significant interest and curiosity around the world. Every company needs cloud services in cloud computing and storage to maintain their business operations. In the past, owing to regulatory mandates banks and financial institutions weren’t allowed to move customer data to cloud. However, they are increasingly moving non-customer data such as data from enterprise applications to cloud. The global cloud services market was valued at USD 210 billion in 2014, and is expected to reach USD 555 billion by 2020, growing at a CAGR of 17.6%.

Some of the key Cloud Services trends to watch out in the year ahead

Serverless Computing: Serverless computing is not new to enterprises, it has been around since 2014 with the introduction of AWS Lambda cloud computing platform.

Gartner predicts that more than 20 percent of global enterprises will have adopted serverless computing technologies by 2020, a sharp increase from the 5 percent in 2018. The biggest advantage of serverless is that it enables developers to focus on their core product instead of worrying about managing and operating servers, either in the cloud or on-premise.

Interoperability: This allows customers to move applications and data between on-premises and cloud systems, and between cloud services offered by different providers with little to no impact on systems and processes. Due to interoperability, different cloud services providers can understand each other’s APIs, configuration, data formats and forms of authentication and authorization.

Edge Computing: The development of enterprise critical applications involving new-age technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning (ML), consumes larger data sets. This has promoted the demand for localized computer, data storage, and network resources. Edge computing is expected to grow at a tremendous rate in the coming years. The edge computing market was valued at USD 1273 million in 2018, and is expected to reach USD 6960 million by 2024, at a CAGR of 34%.

Omni-cloud: We are headed into a multi-cloud world as enterprises are routinely deploying workloads across multiple Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers. However, as applications are becoming more portable, compute cycles need to be quicker in real-time. The year 2020 will witness enterprises moving from Multi-cloud to Omni-cloud channel to reap the benefits of real-time data availability for effective decision making, security, ease of use and scalability.

Kubernetes: In today’s IT world, containers have become very popular since it assists developers to manage and move software code. Businesses are increasingly upgrading containers to enable portability between cloud services from AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, as they ensure DevOps strategies for faster software production. Kubernetes is a popular open-source platform for the orchestration of containers — that is, management of the applications that are built-out of multiple, large, and self-contained runtimes.

Mobile Cloud Computing: The mobile cloud market was valued at USD 24.51 billion in 2018, and is expected to reach USD 94.75 billion by the end of 2024, at CAGR of 25.28%. The substantial growth in smartphones and other portable devices has created an upsurge in the mobile cloud computing market. The mobile cloud offers access to cloud-based applications and services directly to portable devices. This creates an ease of accessing applications or services stored with desired data on any device.

By Neelesh Kripalani, Senior Vice President  and Head Center of Excellence (CoE), Clover Infotech