Given the explosive growth of cloud in the past couple of years, CIOs should keep a closer look at cloud computing trends in the coming years.
With the pandemic restricting in-person interactions for organizations, company leaders had no choice but to rely on digital technology to keep their operations afloat. Cloud computing, which was slowly gaining traction and was already becoming the preferred choice, played a critical role in keeping the business afloat. Given the uncertainty in the economic and enterprise environment, it is likely that organizations will continue to have to rely on cloud tools and platforms for the future, especially in 2022.
“Our global economy is driven by the sharing economy model from everything from real estate, entertainment, transportation, to IT services,” says Kash Shaikh, President and CEO, Virtana. He adds, “loud is no exception but what constrains the true value of cloud is that big public cloud providers own the market and make public cloud at scale cost-prohibitive. Eventually, once the post COVID economy rebounds and stabilizes, governments will step in and regulate this industry much like the telecom industry from decades before.”
In 2022, IT leaders will witness the focus shifting away from the deployment of cloud tools and platforms to refine a specific function towards a more comprehensive strategy that is centered on enterprise-wide cloud migration. While organizations continue to strive to augment the ability of remote and hybridized workforces, IT leaders can see ongoing innovation in the cloud as well as data center infrastructure.
Here are five cloud computing trends that IT leaders should watch out for in 2022:
1. The rise of Hybrid Cloud Computing
Presently, there are no solutions provided by public cloud providers to reduce costs. Not only that, with the rise of multi-cloud, infrastructures are increasingly becoming complex with more choices. “More cloud providers are driven by economics,” says Kash Shaikh. He further added, “this upcoming year will be hallmarked by flexibility and transparency for costs. The secondary market will grow and rise because there is a strong need to create a niche to compete against the industry giants, although smaller players can’t compete with their massive scale and unlimited capital to become a strong alternative option.
Ultimately, just like in the telecom industry, the large public cloud providers will need to be broken down. Right now, there is some hesitation due to COVID and a slower economic recovery. My sense is that it will be at least five years before significant action will be taken.”
2. Sustainability will drive cloud innovation
The concerns of reducing carbon footprint are prevalent, especially in the enterprise environment. With data centers requiring substantial energy to operate while also being responsible for emitting CO2 emissions, organizations will spend 2022 by executing measures and innovations aimed at helping them achieve net-zero carbon aspirations.
3.Edge Computing, data lives on the edge
Edge computing provides data processing capabilities such as storage, collection and analysis much nearer to the sources generated by data instead of relying on a centralized cloud platform. This enables organizations to reduce latency and powers the usage of edge devices. “Gartner predicts 75% of business-generated data will be created and processed outside of a centralized cloud by 2025,” says Kash Shaikh. He further added, “For autonomous cars, for example, to transmit massive data from thousands of devices to the on-prem data centers and cloud for processing with the desired latency, it is desirable to build data storage and processing capabilities on edge. Technologies such as IoT, analytics and 5G can build edge computing capabilities where the data is processed and analyzed right at the location, and required insight is provided.”
4. Rise of Serverless
While still a relatively new concept, serverless cloud computing is gaining momentum in the marketer from established cloud providers. Also known as “function-as-a-service”, serverless cloud computing promises a pay-as-you-go service where the infrastructure continues to scale in the background as per the requirements of the application.
Serverless within cloud computing will have a big part to play in the broader trend across the cloud and the entire tech landscape of creating new user experiences that make innovation more accessible.
5. Open Source will accelerate
“The ultimate fate of this innovation is confirmed by a recent survey by Tidelift that found that 68% of organizations recently turned to open source during the economic downturn to help them save time and money,” says Kash Shaikh. He further briefs, “Open-source software is a great way to be flexible, cheaper, and avoid possible costly vendor lock-in. Faster time-to-market along with increased security are important considerations. Open-source projects are usually audited by many different contributors, leading to increased code quality and no secret backdoors or vulnerabilities.”