By Amit Gupta
2020 has been a year of great learning for enterprises in a unique way. It is the year when technology became the superhero—by helping companies effectively deal with the all-pervasive uncertainty and global crisis.
Amid these challenging times, cloud computing emerged as the biggest boon for enterprises. Cloud was, in many ways, like a rising tide that lifts all boats. It allowed businesses of all sizes and nature to rapidly enable business continuity mechanisms when the pandemic struck. The biggest case in point is perhaps how millions of workers were moved to a ‘work-from-home’ model in a relatively short span of time.
Various market reports predict that the cloud market will undergo unprecedented growth in the next one year and beyond. The Deloitte annual report predicts that “global cloud spending will grow 7x faster than overall IT spend and revenue growth will remain greater than 30 per cent for 2021 through 2025 as companies migrate to the cloud to save money, become more agile and drive innovation”.
Much of this growth will be likely attributed to public cloud. The global public cloud infrastructure market is predicted to grow 35 percent to US$ 120 billion in 2021, according to Forrester research.
Here are three big trends that will continue to amp up the cloud computing market in 2021:
Resilience. Adaptability. Agility: One of the most important takeaways that businesses had in 2020 is the fact that ‘uncertainty’ is at the core of what we call as the ‘new normal’. Nobody knows how long we will continue to work from home, learn remotely, prefer digital healthcare and shop/play online. The only thing that businesses can be sure of is the ‘instability’ and be prepared for change.
What it also means is that organisations need to relook at and invest on three key pillars to thrive in the new world order—resilience, adaptability, and agility. And these three pillars are going to be built on the strong foundation of cloud, which allows businesses to operate during disruption, scale up rapidly when volumes peak and stay flexible as the market demand fluctuates. Not just that, IT departments worldwide had to relook at the way they bought, deployed, managed and consumed technology over the years. And cloud has been instrumental in shaping up some of these trends that will likely prevail well into the post-pandemic era. Quite visibly, these are going to be part of organisations’ long-term strategies as they navigate the new normal.
The year of cloud-native: The changing market dynamics and the need to stay agile and adaptable will further drive the adoption of containerisation and cloud-native apps in 2021. IDC predicts that over 500 million digital apps and services will be developed and deployed using cloud-native approaches.
Kubernetes in production is expected to go mainstream in 2021 as enterprises to strive to roll out applications and services in record time.
This also means that cloud-native security will take center stage in the coming year as more threats will be directed at compromising app data. Subsequently we will see the importance of DevSecOp going up significantly in 2021.
“Edge” over data centre: Edge computing market is predicted to boom in 2021, owing to the proliferation of private 5G networks and the increasing need for ultra-low latent intelligent edge applications. According to IDC, over 50 percent of new enterprise IT infrastructure deployed by 2023 will be at the edge rather than corporate data centres.
Personalised content and service delivery, increasing IoT use cases, smart factories, etc., will clearly push up the need for edge infrastructure. The media and entertainment industry alone will generate a large chunk of edge computing market in the new normal where gaming, music, video and much more will be streamed real-time.
Many industry experts however believe that edge will likely eat into cloud computing spending. In reality, 2021 will see both these technologies complementing and co-existing to deliver true real-time experience to customers. Rather than existing as two siloed components, both cloud and edge computing technologies will be leveraged for their respective advantages to fulfil changing customer demands.
Other than these broad trends, cloud will serve as the de-facto platform on which several radical changes driven by the pandemic are fulfilled and delivered. Indeed, a new era of cloud has just dawned!
