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The Evolution of Cloud-based Technologies

Cloud computing has come a long way since its beginning and is shaking up both the enterprise IT and supplier landscape, and

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In today’s digital era, technology trends, such as big data, cloud computing, mobility and social media are giving businesses new marketing and operational capabilities. Technology is too critical for competitive performance to be left just to the IT function of a company. As a result, many enterprises are now calling upon their senior-executive teams to get involved in technology issues. Boards have also started taking a strategic view of how technology trends are shaping the future of their companies. The question now is not if companies will undergo a cloud transformation - but what services they should shift into the cloud, how quickly this can be done and what will be the costs incurred.

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Cloud Strategies over the Years

Cloud computing has come a long way since its beginning and is shaking up both the enterprise IT and supplier landscape. In the late 90s, we had Web 2.0 as a result of the availability of much-improved bandwidths for the masses. With the arrival of Sales Force Dot Com (SDFC) in 1999, the foundation for other software houses to begin delivering applications over the Internet was also laid. Google, among many others, offered browser-based enterprise applications including Google Apps (G Suite) and Microsoft came up with Office 365. Many companies encouraged their customers to upgrade to the cloud-based versions of their products over the next few years with great success. According to Gartner in 2017, many enterprises now spend millions of their IT budgets on cloud services every year.

In the last decade, cloud computing has evolved to become the technological lifeblood that runs through most modern enterprises. The next decade of cloud computing will be just as eventful. Security in the cloud is perhaps now seen as a strength rather than a challenge as perceived in earlier years.

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Cloud Solutions Now

In the last three years, the massive growth in cloud solutions and an increase in adoption of cloud strategies have given businesses an edge over their competition. Forrester had predicted that more than 50 per cent of enterprises would adopt cloud-enabled applications, platforms and services to drive the digital revolution by the end of 2018. An International Data Corporation (IDC) research report predicted that cloud computing spending would grow at six times the rate of IT spending through 2020 and that it was growing at 4.5 times the rate of IT spending since 2009. Public cloud computing worldwide will increase from $67B in 2015 to $162B in 2020, at a CAGR (Compounded Annual Growth Rate) of 19 per cent. The adoption of container strategies has been rapid in recent times. Faster release cycles, automatic scalability, increased availability, application portability and lower costs are some of the key benefits offered by container technologies, which has resulted in increased adoption.

Vision 2020

The popularity of cloud is only growing, and in the coming years, we expect it to grow even further. With the introduction of serverless cloud computing, developers are now able to build and run applications and services without the added worry of managing and operating servers. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), too, are taking centre stage and are set to revolutionise cloud solutions. With computational power being readily available through the cloud, coupled with advances in deep neural networks, companies with smart machine technologies can easily access data, align with new situations and solve data issues.  As mobility is getting enhanced, the cloud is getting global. Organisations need to participate actively in the adoption of cloud, its development and security to achieve business goals.

By Prabhakar Jayakumar, Country Director, DigitalOcean

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