CXO News Desk
Cloud computing has been perhaps the most transformative technology in the past several years and has changed the nature of how organizations work. Although cloud took root before 2010, in many ways, 2010 was the year it started to accelerate.
The three cloud giants—Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google—had all launched their cloud businesses. It was also the year that saw the birth of OpenStack, the leading open-source cloud software platform. Worldwide spending on public cloud started the decade at $77 billion, according to Statista, and was projected to finish it at $411 billion—more than five times that amount.
Over the past decade, enterprise sentiment toward cloud adoption has drastically improved. More than a third of organizations see cloud investments as a top three investing priority, which is impacting market offerings, according to Gartner.
While SaaS was already the cloud platform of the previous decade (2000s), its acceleration continued at a rapid rate in recent years. Between 2015 and 2017, the average number of SaaS apps used by organizations has doubled, according to a new research. The incredible growth in the SaaS sector is emphasized by the number of startups founded in emerging economies, with India seeing 55 new SaaS startups in 2017 – as a reference point, a decade previously, only a dozen new companies were founded.
But it was Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) that grabbed the spotlight this decade. Not only it has improved businesses’ productivity but also helped them have a true agile environment. By 2018, the top five IaaS providers (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Alibaba) accounted for nearly 77% of the global IaaS market, according to Gartner. The firm also predicted that by the end of 2019, more than 30% of technology providers’ new software investments will shift from cloud-first to cloud-only.
In 2020, the cloud market combined, including cloud applications (SaaS), development and data platforms (PaaS), and infrastructure (IaaS) services is expected grow to $299.4 billion, as predicted by Forrester, the foundation of the growth was laid in the 2010s.
Read more: Cloud Trends: What Lies in Store for 2020 and Beyond
Some of the other notable achievements in the cloud include serverless computing that was essentially born at the 2014 AWS re:Invent conference, with Amazon Web Services’ announcement of Lambda. The serverless model is one in which functions are typically executed in the cloud Microsoft and Google soon followed with their individual platforms.
The decade also saw the rise of Kubernetes changing the face of the hybrid cloud. It has grown to become the most popular orchestration tool for software containers that are used to host modern applications that can run on any computing platform. Analysts believe, Kubernetes will continue its strong growth, to the point where it becomes embedded in almost every platform.
Studies have also highlighted a big shift to a multicloud computing strategy by global enterprises. While still a nascent concept, a few milestones in recent months, including Dell Technologies’ move to put VMware at the center of its cloud platform, IBM’s purchase of Red Hat to give a tough competition to the other cloud giants shows that we are reaching closer to reality in the multicloud world. As Michael Warrilow, a vice president at Gartner reasoned, “Most organizations will adopt a multicloud strategy out of a desire to avoid vendor lock-in or to take advantage of best-of-breed solutions.”
Despite the momentum, security and data protection appears to be quite challenging in a multicloud environment. Cyber threats will continue to intensify. Attackers are increasingly going after corporate data stored in the cloud. This certainly introduces new attack surfaces and vulnerabilities for organizations. However, the move to cloud is inevitable and is not something that organizations are willing to compromise for security or any other reasons.
Hence, businesses need an approach to privatize data and control how and for whom their data creates value and risk. As Vikas Arora, Vice President, Cloud & Cognitive Software & Services, IBM India and South Asia, said, “In 2020, security operations will become centralized as more tools to discover security insights and respond to incidents faster, become available to CISOs.”
Read more: How CISOs Can Change The Game Of Cloud Security
There will be newer to innovation in terms of new products and services along with arriving at newer business models. IDC predicts that by 2022, nearly 40% of core IT spending will be cloud-related, and by 2028, the cloud will account for 80% or more of IT spending. The edge, on the other hand, will continue to support cloud expansion and also power workload optimization.
While cloud security breaches will continue to rise in the next decade, the good news is as IDC forecasts, by 2020, over 50% of modern edge IT and network services will be managed from the cloud, supported by secure, virtualized edge architectures.
