We are guaranteed to see a continued rise in cloud adoption, as multi-cloud and hybrid environments continue to feed the flexible consumption embraced by organisations, as we head into this new decade.

Cloud Solutions

As many organisations make a move towards digital transformation, the hybrid-cloud approach is considered to be a provisional step along this long process. Many companies are choosing to hold their workloads on both public and private clouds due to a number of factors, with the need to comply with corporate guidelines and reliance on legacy systems being chief among them. Hybrid infrastructure management will be adopted by 90% of companies by 2020 according to Gartner.

Multi-cloud solutions bringing together cloud solutions from different providers are increasingly being adopted by companies – from those providing noise surveys london to fashion ratailers – in addition to the hybrid approach. Multi-cloud networks combining the use of Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and AWS (Amazon Web Services) are already being used by 58% of enterprises according to a Kentik report published in 2019. Before organisations make a long-term commitment, they can evaluate the pros and cons of different services through a multi-cloud approach.

A huge number of enterprises are still apprehensive about using public clouds; one of the main factors behind the popularity of hybrid cloud systems. Around 50% of enterprises are not open to the idea of hosting mission-critical processes on a public cloud, according to a recent report by FileCloud. More than 50% of companies struggle with protecting their work, and are concerned that the speed of their cloud adoption might not keep up with the maturity of their security, according to Symantec.

Cloud Security

Providers have a unique opportunity thanks to the growing concern about cloud security. More often than not, enterprises can only dream of being capable of developing the security expertise and capabilities that most cloud providers already possess. The adoption of the hybrid cloud is largely driven by security for this very reason. Across a variety of industries, including highly regulated industries such as government and financial services among others, cloud-based security solutions continue to gain popularity.

Artificial Intelligence

When it comes to acquiring Artificial Intelligence capabilities, cloud based solutions, as we pointed out last year, are still the most popular path. AI is increasingly considered to be a vital driver of growth by enterprises. AI is considered to be critical to the current success being enjoyed by early adopters according to “The Global State of AI in the Enterprise, 2nd Edition” survey by Deloitte. Over the next couple of years, the number of executives that consider AI to be critical is expected to rise exponentially across the world.

To date, streamlining business operations and boosting products and services have been the primary advantages of AI according to our own survey. When it comes to facilitating more involvement of personal assistants in the day to day activities of consumers, delivery of linked equipment, product development and testing, customer interaction management and product and service personalisation, organisations are highly likely to use AI increasingly over the next 12 months.

The time has come for significant growth in edge computing, with the growth of the IoT (Internet of Things) devices in combination with AI driven tools and increased portability of computing power. It is worth noting that in 2019, the portion of data generated by companies outside a cloud or data centre was just 10% – over the next 6 years, this number is expected to rise to 75% – according to Gartner. As such, it is at the edge of networks, or close by that 45 % of data generated from the IoT will be analysed, processed and stored, if predictions by the IDC are anything to go by. Applications of the Internet of Things across various industries, including financial services, healthcare, agriculture, manufacturing, healthcare, logistics and retail, are the potential drivers of this trend.

The customer experience is likely to be transformed by the addition of AI and analytics to fixed and portable networks featuring low real time latency processing capabilities and local high capacity. In any application where the local processing of data is required instead of sending it to a data centre or cloud, such as in the case of driverless cars, distribution facilities and factories, the benefits of edge computing can be had.