Tag: cloud migration
A Look Into The Cloud Computing Trends for 2024
“Fewer, but larger, public cloud platform providers and a maturing SaaS ecosystem will dominate enterprise cloud spending” – The Public Cloud Market Outlook, 2019 To 2022 Forrester Report.
Organizations are recognizing the importance of cloud computing and are adopting the technology steadily over the past few years. With recent technological advancements creating new excitement around the idea of cloud computing, the adoption is now skyrocketing!
According to Gartner, the worldwide public cloud services market will gain a positive growth of 17% in 2020. That is an increase from $227.8 billion in 2019 to 266.4 billion in 2020. This makes it vital for organizations to identify the forces that will shape the cloud computing market this year. This article will help you with this as we discuss five specific trends that will transform cloud computing in 2024.
Why Keep Up with Cloud Computing?
Aggregated mostly around Amazon, Google and Microsoft, the cloud market underwent a profound change in the recent past. The pace for cloud adoption and innovation will inevitably continue to accelerate across industries and regions providing new opportunities, and new levels of quality and efficiency. The question you must be asking is: What is in store for the cloud computing market and how should you prepare for it in 2024?
1. Shifting Gears from Multi-Cloud to Hybrid-Cloud
2019 has seen how organizations routinely deployed workloads across multiple clouds. In order to achieve expected outcomes in business, organizations will have to adopt the right and appropriate cloud strategy. A hybrid cloud computing structure uses an orchestration of local servers, private cloud, and third-party public cloud services to achieve desired results. According to The RightScale 2019 State of The Cloud Report, the hybrid cloud adoption rate was estimated at 58% last year.
In this transitional era, the hybrid-cloud will become an integral part of the long-term vision for industries on how they will meet their needs. It can provide a seamless experience to enterprises and help them solve complicated challenges around latency. Customers too won’t have to deal with two different pieces of infrastructure; on-premise and public cloud. Thus, the shift to a hybrid-cloud will make things easier for both the organization as well as the customers.
Related Reading: Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure: How It Benefits Your Business
2. Serverless Computing
“Serverless computation is going to fundamentally change not only the economics of what is back-end computing, but it’s going to be the core of the future of distributed computing,” says Satya Nadella, Chief Executive Officer at Microsoft. This comment clearly shows what the future of serverless computing is.
Serverless computing ensures that developers must only focus on their core product without worrying about operating and managing the servers. This is an advantage that moves enterprises to adopt serverless computing. According to Gartner, more than 20% of global enterprises will deploy serverless computing technologies by 2020.
3. Cloud Security will Become Paramount
Many organizations feel that cloud computing could pose security issues. They might have concerns about regulatory and privacy issues, along with compliance and governance issues. Consequently, security features of public data have become the key focus in coming years. It will not be just about access controls or policy creations. Aspects such as data encryption, cloud workload security, and threat intelligence will gain priority as part of an organization’s security measures. In future we will see security features such as privileged access management and shared responsibility models.
According to Kristin Davis of 42crunch.com, 2019 became the year where API Security threats came to notice. As the year progressed, we have observed a lot of high profile API breaches and vulnerabilities, including the ones at Facebook, Amazon Ring, GitHub, Cisco, Kubernetes, Uber, Verizon, etc. In their October 2019 report, Gartner estimates that by 2021, exposed APIs will form a larger attack surface than UIs for 90% of web-enabled applications. In coming years, we expect API security getting to the top of the agenda of a chief information security officer. Also, DevOps tools and processes are expanding to DevSecOps, to lower the risks and implement security by design.
Mihai Corbuleac, Senior IT Consultant at StratusPointIT predicts security acquisitions to make more headlines in 2020, it has made the headlines over the last year. It is because all cloud companies that can’t develop in-house modern security solutions have to look to buy them.
Related Reading: How Secure is Your Business in a Multi-Cloud Environment
4. Digital Natives
As the workforce evolves, the expectations of the workers will definitely increase. Those joining the workforce will be well-acquainted with cloud computing and its advantages. Such workers are called ‘digital natives.’
Organizations will have two sets of workers as a consequence: those who have adopted digital best practices and those who have not. This would call for a need to train the second set of workers, which is called ‘reverse mentoring.’ The adoption of cloud computing and related technologies will enable organizations to integrate both the workgroups into one unified workforce.
5. Quantum Computing
Quantum computing requires massive hardware developments. This opens up the potential to exponentially increase the efficiency of computers in coming years. It allows computers and their servers to process more rapidly than ever before. Quantum computing also has the potential to limit energy consumption. It requires lesser consumption of electricity while generating massive amounts of computing energy. Best of all, quantum computing can have a positive effect on the environment and the economy.
Are You Keeping Up the Pace?
Whether you are a large organization or a small one, cloud computing will remain a compelling, fast-moving force in future. Adopting cloud computing technology will enable organizations to mitigate risks and capitalize on opportunities. Ultimately, organizations will have a number of decisions to make with regards to cloud computing. It will include deciding when and how to adopt cloud computing technology, as well as for deciding on the specific model they would like to adopt.
Related Reading: Cloud Migration: Essentials to Know Before You Jump on the Bandwagon
With years of experience in helping clients transform their business by the power of the cloud, Fingent can help you understand and implement this technology seamlessly in your business. Contact us to know more.
Businesses, especially small businesses, these days are increasingly adopting cloud service technologies. Why?
It’s the flexibility, scalability and value features of the cloud that are apparently driving this growth in its adoption. The basic aim is to allow employees to work better and promote an efficient work environment, with their offices available everywhere, now that telecommuting is becoming more prevalent as a trend.
Here are some facts that prove how rapidly telecommuting is becoming mainstream:
- By 2020, cloud spending in terms of IT and services is likely to exceed half a trillion dollars.
- 70% of software revenues are based on cloud code – SaaS, PaaS or on-premise as ISV’s base on-premise on cloud platforms.
- Tweet: Almost 50% of large enterprises are looking to double up software and services development staff for cloud projects.
But, as a general fact,
do all businesses stand to gain from using cloud services?
Will all businesses reap equal and extensive benefits from using the cloud?
Is it beneficial for you to use the cloud?
The answer to all these questions depends on the size of the business as well as preferences in terms of data, storage, security and the like.
Before you jump on the bandwagon, you need to analyse your business scenario and your preferences to make an intelligent decision.
Is cloud migration the right way to go for you?
Cloud migration (or moving your apps and services to the cloud), is more of a long term trend. While it may have several benefits of its own, there are several factors that you need to consider before going for it.
When should you consider moving to the cloud?
- If your applications are experiencing an explosive increase in traffic and it is practically difficult for you to scale and arrange resources on the fly, in order to meet the rising demand.
- If you are a software solutions provider and your clients are increasingly demanding faster application development and deployment, and you want to facilitate that while cutting down on infrastructure overheads.
- If your clients are looking to expand their business and diversify geographically and you think it might be a challenge for you to accommodate a multi-region infrastructure system, including its due maintenance, time and human resources.
- If you are looking to reduce your operational costs and increase the effectiveness of your IT.
- If you are looking to set up a disaster recovery system for an entire data center, while still having adequate control over resources and keeping costs under check.
- If you are planning to expand your development team and make it widely distributed so as to allow even remotely located employees to work easily.
These are just some common situations where you could consider cloud migration. There may be more. If you can relate to at least some these, then you can probably start planning.
Small and medium businesses are more likely to be experiencing one or more of the above scenarios. They are the ones who are constantly undergoing rapid and drastic changes in terms of scale, profits and business size. Hence, the obvious features of the cloud like scalability and accessibility can come in very useful.
Large enterprises may have more sustained developments in their business, in which case, they may not necessarily need the cloud. There are other options for them which we’ll be getting into, in a while.
The flipside
Now let’s see some possible consequences that follow cloud migration. You might want to consider the flip side of things as well, before getting into it.
- If your application uses, stores and sends back a lot of sensitive data, then you might not be able to use the cloud. Even compliance regulations restrict you from maintaining such data, in sources like the cloud.
- If you are using proprietary software or technology, and you are looking to move to the cloud, then you have a problem. It might not be legally possible for you to move or deploy such software into the cloud.
- You might have to deal with transparency and control issues, as your hardware is being controlled by someone else.
- You might encounter latency or dormancy issues with certain operations when using the cloud.
- If you want to retain ownership of certain data in your application, then cloud might not be the thing for you. When you migrate your data to the cloud, you have no control of where your data gets stored.
- Shared resources can lead to occasional disturbances in terms of performance and efficiency.
- Your application’s design or architecture might not be suitable as such to fit the cloud architecture. Hence you might need to make certain modifications.
Again, these are only some limitations of cloud migration to get you started on the thinking process. The most common ones are listed above. You may have to deal with other minor issues as and when you migrate.
To make a judgment…
On a normal case, where you already have a setup, which is satisfactory to your employees as well as customers, and you don’t really need much scaling and maintenance at the moment, then you could very well continue as such. It would not be worth these limitations for you to disturb the existing smooth process.
If you are a startup company in the manufacturing industry, it might not be feasible to maintain in-house servers and applications for internal uses. You also might not encounter a lot of the above-mentioned issues as you don’t use the cloud to serve customers directly. In such cases, opting for cloud services might be the best way to go.
For those of you who own large business enterprises in the software industry, it might be better to go for a hybrid model – one which combines the best of cloud services as well as in-house servers or private servers. For applications that involve a lot of sensitive data, or for proprietary software, you could use your own servers, and for other applications, you could use cloud services. That way, you don’t have to compromise on security or data ownership issues while at the same time, attain the flexibility and scalability of the cloud.
You also have the option of private clouds. More on that soon.
The cloud computing model
From a broad perspective, you could go for one out of three cloud computing models – Iaas (Infrastructure as a Service), SaaS (Software as a Service) and PaaS (Platform as a Service).
In case of IaaS models, you don’t have to take care of storage, networking, CDN and virtualization. They can all be left to the IaaS provider.
In PaaS, the application platform, the development, and the database are all handled by the providers.
SaaS models take care of business management, CRM, security as well as tools.
It is important to choose the model once you have decided to for the cloud.
The cloud options
Large enterprises also have the option of choosing a private or a hybrid cloud model.
Private cloud is where you can create your own cloud using specific platforms like Openstack. That way you can access the benefits of the cloud, while still retaining data security and ownership. It is apt for businesses using secure and confidential information and core systems.
A public cloud is where all of your resources are hosted by a separate cloud service provider. It supports more number of customers and is better suited for companies having lesser confidential information, as all the resources are publicly shared and virtualized.
A hybrid cloud model is one in which your resources are spread over private and public clouds. Specific resources can be used in the private cloud, whereas those which do not need a high level of security can be hosted by the public servers. Large software enterprises can benefit from using this model as they can have the best of both worlds. It is a perfect blend of reliability, availability, security and reduced operations costs.
It is extremely important for business enterprises, whether large, medium or small to analyze their business and choose the appropriate cloud solution. If your business scenario demands cloud migration, then your next steps should be in choosing the right model. Once you know exactly what kind of cloud services you need, you can be sure you are doing the right thing.
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