Cloud computing has been the buzzword around the industry for so long that the term is close to meaning a whole lot of things and nothing at the same time. Most often, it is associated with the process of businesses moving out of their dependence on good old physical data centers to migrate to the cloud. IDC FutureScape suggests that most companies will pivot towards deploying dedicated cloud platforms to use for offering innovative services instead of further investments in renovating their existing data centers.
But migration is only the first step of digital business transformation. The process is iterative and dependent on how cleverly you can strategize the use of the technology to derive business benefits. This is especially applicable since 2020 as workers have gone on global remote and anywhere operations is likely to be in vogue for quite some time in the future. The only way to keep your enterprise network securely connected, gather strategic business intelligence and use that data to enhance customer delight and ensure highest quality of service now is through extensive use of cloud technology.
Since cloud is integral to ensuring scalability, business continuity and cost efficiency for all businesses moving forward, here are our top 10 future cloud computing trends to watch in 2021.
1. Hybrid/ Multi-Cloud Solutions
The popularity of hybrid clouds will continue to rise as companies find them a good balance between the public and private cloud architectures. Hybrid or multi-cloud environments provide a mix of great speeds, flexibility, better degree of control over public clouds and better security. While private clouds continue to offer the maximum security, it comes with high maintenance costs and complexity that are difficult for most small and medium enterprises to abide by. As companies are forced to rethink their infrastructures in the current business climate, hybrid cloud seems to be the best option, unless they want to move to the edge directly.
2. Backup And Disaster Recovery
With instant service getting to be the baseline of customer expectations, businesses can no longer afford downtimes. They represent not just lost man-hours, but lost business opportunities and customer frustration. Recurrence can easily make them switch their loyalties to a competing business. Also, with the rising threat of cybercrimes, a pause in business in the event of an attack has become the norm and not an exception. Gartner estimates that the average cost of IT downtime is about $5,600 per minute. Little surprise then that most companies, irrespective of size, are moving towards Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service with providers who have the ability to guarantee uptimes and business continuity within a stipulated timeframe. ActiveCo is one of the top choices in cloud backup Vancouver.
3. Serverless Architecture
Serverless computing is fast gaining popularity as the only architecture capable of reallocating the entire base by isolating the start and end apart from the application. This removes the limitations of traditional IT infrastructure and businesses no longer require to purchase or rent servers. With the pay-as-you-go systems, for instance, companies are allowed much greater flexibility and greater degree of control over the costs of cloud hosting.
4. AI Platform
With automation nearly becoming a requirement for businesses to run efficiently and stay competitive, artificial intelligence is fast gaining popularity to process the enormous data flows from Big Data as well as automate and manage business processes.
5. Cloud Security
2020 saw a huge boom in the incidence of all forms of digital threats, especially large-scale attacks targeted at businesses. This is now an even bigger challenge with most companies migrating to cloud platforms. Cloud security will be a trend out of sheer necessity for organizations to protect their own as well as customer’s data and the rising stricter cyber regulation and compliance requirement across Europe and North America. Cloud security providers who can ensure security and regulations compliance and ensure highly secure and transparent data practices will be in high demand going forward.
6. IoT Platform
Gartner estimates that the number of connected devices in use is likely to reach 25 billion by 2021. Since IoT is the basic enablement platform for collecting, analysing and responding through sensor-enabled endpoints whether it be a smartphone, smart home or billions of connected devices on factory floors, we can expect the technology to become more mainstream and bring forward exciting innovations. McKinsey Global Institute estimates that IoT could have an annual business of nearly $11.1 trillion by 2025.
7. Edge Computing
With digital transformation comes the need for agile and scalable technology to power data centers. By shifting the site of information processing close to where the data is generated, the processing becomes that much faster, more reliable and secure. This is known as edge computing that facilitates data processing at or near the source of where the data is generated. This can help businesses and services make data-informed decisions in real-time, and reduce the burden of data on the hub by transferring only relevant data. With anywhere operations and remote project deployments gaining momentum, edge computing is likely to become an indispensable part of cloud computing.
8. DevSecOps
Despite the numerous benefits offered by cloud computing, it does come with its fair share of security risks. These include network eavesdropping, invasion, denial of service (DoS) attacks, virtualization vulnerabilities and more. DevSecOps is the way out for a lot of security challenges as it works on the basis of automating core security tasks and embedding security as part of the workflow architecture. Since the sustainability of cloud deployments largely rely on how secure companies can make it, DevSecOps is likely to be an integral methodology adopted by companies to secure cloud environments.
9. Service Mesh
Cloud platforms are highly complex and made even more so as they are adapted to service evolving needs of users. This is why the service mesh becomes a critical component of the cloud architecture to ensure a speedy and secure communication environment. Essentially, the service mesh serves as a dedicated layer of service-to-service communication that ensures that the variety of requirements coming up from service identities are swiftly processed as per various policies within the cloud platform. This allows businesses to decouple and unload a lot of the application network functions from service code.
10. Open Source
With the entire tech industry moving towards a more collaborative environment, cloud computing services are likely to shift towards open source services. Open source cloud computing will not only allow businesses to customize the cloud infrastructure as per their unique needs but also allow them to scale quickly, add/ remove features with much more simplicity than in closed source environments and is likely to be more secure to boot.
Do you want to get started with designing and implementing a comprehensive cloud computing strategy for your business?
At ActiveCo, you will find a reliable partner with decades of industry trust and experience in IT Support Vancouver to support its standing. We try and integrate as closely with client businesses as possible and design adaptable, scalable, secure, and innovative cloud systems that can truly transform the face of your business.
ActiveCo can help business implement Cloud Computing in Vancouver and help you enable:
- Highly collaborative work environments
- Opting for an open-source cloud computing service
- Ensure that your cloud platform has all the features that you need
Get a free consultation in hybrid cloud computing from our experts at ActiveCo.
