There is one thing for certain as we go into this next decade: the adoption of the cloud will continue to increase as we embrace what they call flexible consumption through multi-cloud and hybrid environments. Here, experts at Ally and Mo Media explain.
The hybrid cloud approach, for many businesses, is a beginning step toward the process of completely entering into this digital transformation. There are many factors involved which include this of legacy systems and complying with regulations, as well as corporations and organisations that have public and private clouds where they position their workloads. By 2020, according to Gartner, nearly 91% of all organisations will have some type of hybrid infrastructure for management purposes.
Multi-Cloud Solutions
There is not just the hybrid cloud, but there are other multi-cloud solutions that enterprises are using if they are working with multiple providers. There was a report back in 2019 by Kentik which stated that nearly 60% of businesses are combining the usage of will cloud (?QUERY? Not sure if this is the intended phrase?), Microsoft Azure, and also AWS from Amazon. By utilising the multi-cloud approach, the weaknesses and strengths of companies, as well as vendors, can be determined prior to any type of long-term commitment.
Utilising public clouds, however, is still not fully accepted, primarily because hybrid clouds are extremely popular right now. According to FileCloud, nearly half of the companies have no plans for moving their most critical workloads on to any sort of public cloud. Other reports have also stated that half of the organisations have no way of protecting these workloads, and because of lacklustre security measures, especially according to Symantec, it is simply not good enough.
Cloud Security
There is a unique opportunity brewing regarding this concern over cloud security. Cloud providers, for instance, can offer excellent expertise and capabilities for businesses that they may not have on their own. Security is a primary focus when looking at hybrid cloud options. For this to gain traction, especially in areas of government or financial services, security needs to be improved.
Last year we had mentioned that cloud-based solutions may be related directly to AI capabilities. Those that are looking at AI, and their continual growth and innovation, see this as an area that needs to be developed. There was an article that discussed those that adopted AI early on, stating that this technology would be very important for a company’s success now and in the future. Some executives also saw this as very important for global expansion in the coming years.
The benefits of AI have to do with optimising your business operations and also enhancing the services and products that you can offer the public. In the years to come, it is possible that AI may be providing customer service, testing products, developing products, delivering equipment, personalizing services and products, and may also act as personal assistance for those that will need physical help.
The Internet of Things
There are certain devices called Internet of Things which focuses upon AI driven tools and portable computing power, and it is believed that now is the time for significant growth. According to Gartner, about 10% of all data was outside of their data centre back in 2019. As the years progress, perhaps in six years, this could be about 75%. IDC has stated that they predict 45% of this technology will be acted upon, analysed, processed, and stored using these cloud-based networks in the next few years. Those that will be using IoT applications will include those that are in agriculture, logistics, financial services, energy, healthcare, retail, and in the manufacturing industry.
Fixed and portable networks that possess low latency and high capacity capabilities will allow AI to slowly become more analytical. These are going to be beneficial improvements for distribution factories, autonomous vehicle facilities, and any other location where data can be processed in the cloud versus outside of a local server or data centre for these companies.