What is Cloud Computing?
In simple terms, cloud computing refers to the delivery of hosted services over the internet. It enables enterprises to consume compute resources as a utility, rather than building and maintaining computing infrastructures in-house.
Uptake of Cloud Computing
Over the past few years, cloud computing has emerged as an elemental part of a company’s IT strategy. It has, to a great extent, opened and revolutionized the way IT provides services along with how consumers access applications, information and services.
A brief snapshot of the uptake of cloud services is as follows:
- 29 per cent of enterprises started using cloud computing in 2014 and 46 per cent of those enterprises now use advanced cloud services.
- By the end of 2015, 93 per cent of organizations were running applications with infrastructure-as-a-service.
- 82 per cent of organizations have adapted a cloud strategy in 2015, up from 74 per cent in 2014.
- 68 per cent of enterprises run less than one-fifth on their application portfolio in cloud.
- Cloud Computing adoption is expected to hit $250 billion by 2017.
- The global SaaS market is expected to grow at a yearly growth rate of 20.2 per cent, implying a growth of 45.5 billion by 2017.
Why have enterprises shifted to the cloud?
The swift shift of enterprises to the cloud is fueled by four major advantages:
Matured user community – Data reporting has become complex. Users manipulate data with advanced analytics in effective ways. The consumers of business intelligence, who expect access to information, can advance business with cloud.
New Technology – Cloud based technological advancements are matching the modern data demands. This is driving the adoption of the hybrid data ecosystems to the drag of enterprise data storage.
Economics – The streamlined data activity, accelerated analytics and lower capital costs with big data & cloud make the cloud cost effective.
Valuable Data types – Cloud has communicated fluidity with modern data demands. It has made the task of analyzing high velocity, high volume and multi-structured data easier and cheaper incorporating highly valuable data into the analytic process to gain great outcomes.
Cloud trends in 2016
In order to regularly adapt the new cloud strategies and to encash market opportunities or eliminate oversightsover the coming time, it becomes highly essential for the enterprises to continually analyze the cloud computing trends. Below we have listed the cloud computing trends that are anticipated to drive user engagement through 2016:
Hybrid Cloud Computing – It refers to using a combination of public and private cloud services along with physical applications, services and infrastructure.
It is quite evident from the latest developments that hybrid cloud computing will become an imperative taking the form of an integrated cloud model, which consists of external as well as internal cloud platforms that can be leveraged on the basis of specific business requirements. Therefore, the companies should put immediate efforts on the integration of application and data infrastructures in order to form a hybrid solution.
Cloud Services Brokerage is becoming a key role of IT–It essentially involves a service provider to assist the consumption of cloud computing. As a trend, CSB is predicted to attain speed during this year as the users choose to use cloud services free from the IT bureaucracy.
So, IT critically needs to find ways in order to position itself as a Business CSB by creating flexible yet simple user-centric processes and tools to uphold its relevance and encourage the end users to look for IT assistance.
Cloud-friendly frameworks have become an enterprise imperative –The cloud-friendly decision frameworks have become a business imperative now. It is quite agreeable that cloud computing offers a host of indispensible benefits and features. It also enables the IT to targetits resources on the delivery of new and more efficient services that accelerate the business.
Cloud-optimized Application design- Now-a-days, more and more enterprises are adapting cloud computing in order to transfer their workload to an application infrastructure. It becomes a good approach since the workload requires a variable supply of resources, where the app logically acquires horizontal scalability.
Datacenters require adapting implementation models from Cloud Service providers – Within an ecosystem of cloud computing, the datacenters along with other implementation details are taken care by the service provider while the business concerns itself only with the service consumption. But, as the enterprises keep expanding their datacenters, it would be better for them to apply the cloud computing models in order to increase efficiency, performance and agility.
Conclusion
These cloud computing trends have already started becoming best practices and they are bound to have deep implications on cloud strategies. Over the coming time, the major external trends like big data, mobility and IoT are expected to create an explosion with the use of true hybrid clouds. It would be interesting to see how in-house applications will modernize to become cloud ready.
