Future Trends in Cloud Computing All Point to Optimization

Given our focus on public cloud cost control, we here at ParkMyCloud are always trying to understand more about the future trends in cloud computing, specifically the public cloud infrastructure (IaaS) and platform (PaaS) market. Now that public cloud has become ubiquitous, there’s a common theme. While new services and products continue to develop, more and more of them are focusing on not just creating capabilities that were previously lacking — they’re focused on optimizing what already exists.

Are Cloud Services Still Growing?

Before we dive into optimization, let’s take a look at how the cloud market continues to grow in 2020 and beyond. Gartner estimates that $257.9B will be spent on public cloud services in 2020, up 6.3 from 2019 as outlined in the table below:

And according to IDC, almost half of IT spending is cloud-based, “reaching 60% of all IT infrastructure and 60–70% of all software, services and technology spending in 2020.” These projections come mid-2020, showing that even given the disruption this year, between Gartner and IDC, no one expects cloud adoption and spending to slow down any time soon. So what’s driving this growth and what are the future trends in cloud computing we should be on the lookout for in 2020 and beyond?

Trends in Cloud Computing You’ve Probably Heard About

There is definitely a lot of hype around Blockchain, Quantum Computing, Machine Learning, and AI, as there should be. But at a more basic level, cloud computing is changing businesses in many ways. Whether it is the way they store their data, improvements to agility and go-to-market for faster release of new products and services, or how they develop and operate services remotely in today’s “locked-down world”, cloud computing is benefitting all businesses in every sector. Smart businesses are always looking for the most innovative ways to improve and accomplish their business objectives, i.e., make money.

When it comes to cloud technology, more and more businesses are realizing the benefits that cloud can provide them and are beginning to seek more cloud solutions to conduct their business activities. And obviously, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, IBM, Cisco, VMWare and Oracle plan to capture this spend by providing a dizzying array of IaaS, PaaS, and DaaS offerings to help enterprises build and run their services.

How These Trends Make Cloud Computing Better

Cloud Automation Tools: as modern IT environments continue to become more diverse and distributed in the pursuit of key business goals, they also bear new challenges for the operation teams responsible for keeping everything running smoothly. The go-to strategy for taming the associated complexity can be summed up in one word — automation.

Automation tools, including some that incorporate AI, are on the rise in 2020. These new automation capabilities, along with comprehensive dashboards that provide a holistic view into multi-cloud operations, will become increasingly important for cloud and IT operations to support the lines of business regardless of where they place their workloads. These tools can help put the right workloads in the right place, manage costs, improve security and governance, and ensure application performance.

Desktop as a service (DaaS): DaaS is expected to have the most significant growth in 2020, increasing 95.4% to $1.2 billion. DaaS offers an inexpensive option for enterprises that are supporting the surge of remote workers due to the global pandemic and their need to securely access enterprise applications from multiple devices and locations.

Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud: Once predicted as the future, the multi- and hybrid cloud world has arrived and will continue to grow. Most enterprises (93 percent) described their strategy as multi-cloud in 2020 according to a Flexera report (up 21% from 2018) and 87% have a hybrid cloud strategy. In addition, 71 percent of public cloud adopters are using 2+ unique cloud environments/platforms. These numbers will only go up in 2021. While this offers plenty of advantages to organizations looking to benefit from different cloud capabilities, using more than one CSP complicates governance, cost optimization, and cloud management further as native CSP tools are not multi-cloud. As cloud computing costs remain a primary concern, it’s crucial for organizations to stay ahead with insight into cloud usage trends to manage spend (and prevent waste) and optimize application performance.

It’s a complex problem, but we do see many organizations adopting a multi-cloud strategy with cost control and governance in mind, as it avoids vendor lock-in and allows flexibility for deploying workloads in the most cost-efficient manner (and at a high level, keeps the cloud providers competitive against each other to continually lower prices).

Growth of Managed Services: The global cloud managed services market is growing rapidly and is expected to reach $116B billion by 2025, growing from $62.4B in 2020 according to a study conducted by Markets and Markets. Enterprises are focusing on their primary business operations, which results in higher cloud managed services adoption. Business services, security services, network services, data center services, and mobility services are major categories in the cloud managed services market. Implementation of these services will help enterprises reduce IT and operations costs and will also enhance productivity of those enterprises.

Managed service providers — the good ones, anyway — are experts in their field and some of the most informed consumers of public cloud. By handing cloud operations off to an outside provider, companies are not only optimizing their own time and human resources — they’re also pushing MSPs to become efficient cloud managers so they can remain competitive and keep costs down for themselves and their customers.

Cloud Trends Are Always Evolving

While today, it sometimes seems like we’ve seen the main components of cloud operations and all that’s left to do is optimize them, history tells us that’s not the case. Cloud has been and will continue to be a disruptive force in enterprise IT for years to come as has the Global Pandemic of 2020, and future technology trends in cloud computing will continue to shape the way enterprises leverage public, private and hybrid cloud. Remember: AWS was founded in 2006, the cloud infrastructure revolution is still in early days, and there is plenty more XaaS to be built.

Originally published at www.parkmycloud.com on October 1, 2020.