Reinvention

Reinvention Nearly all companies now rely on cloud computing services to support everything from data analytics to organizational security. A recent forecast from Gartner predicts that the cloud market will reach a staggering $302.5 billion by 2021, up from $186.4 billion in 2018—an indication that the industry is evolving at a rapid pace.

This progress stems from the trends that have influenced the products available to cloud users and the ways that they have implemented them across their organizations.

As we move closer to 2019, it’s important to look at some of the hot topics we believe will shape the face of the industry both in the immediate future and for years to come.

Multi-cloud platforms	The benefits of moving workloads to he cloud are widely understood and accepted among enterprises. It’s been widely reported that more than 80% of enterprise workloads will be in the cloud by 2020, with 40% of workloads on public cloud platforms and another 20% on hybrid cloud platforms. Some companies are continuing to resist the trend of moving to the cloud as it seems like a difficult, if not impossible, task. Between keeping everything on premises and moving everything to the cloud comes a middle ground to settle at: hybrid cloud. With hybrid cloud becoming the next major computing platform, IT decision makers can benefit from increased efficiency to flexibility that could meet disparate needs whenever required. With a hybrid cloud, companies can transition to the cloud at their own pace, with less risk and at a lower cost. In 2019, more companies will choose a hybrid-cloud approach that will allow them to access the efficiency and effectiveness of cloud solutions.
Containerization	The use of Data Containers will become easier to use and more and more popular for transferring data. Containers resolve the problem of having software run reliably when transferring the data from one system to another. Data Containers store and organize virtual objects (a self-contained entity consisting of both data and the procedures used to manipulate the data). However, there are limitations. While containers are very easy to transport, they can only be used with servers having compatible operating system “kernels.” While this limits the servers that can be used, Kubernetes has become popular and has provided the “standard method” for the orchestration of all of the nodes within the application. Additionally, Amazon, Google, IBM, and Microsoft offer Kubernetes-as-a-Service. This makes it easier to shift the infrastructure between major Cloud providers.
Serverless Computing	The emerging “serverless” computing deployment model will also gain traction as more companies look to roll out digital services and applications. In serverless computing, organizations develop, run, and manage applications without building and maintaining the infrastructure to run them. It provides an API to associate the function with one or more event, such as object getting uploaded into a S3 bucket. Expect AWS, Microsoft, Google and other cloud vendors to ramp up their portfolios for serverless, also called function-as-a-service (FaaS).
Edge Computing	As companies find themselves needing near-instant access to data and compute resources to serve customers in the digital age, they are increasingly turning to edge computing. Edge computing pushes certain compute processes away from centralized data centers to points in the network closer to users, devices and sensors. It can reduce connectivity costs by sending only the most important information instead of raw streams of data. Edge is not the end of cloud computing but rather a natural evolution that we’ll see Telcos, manufacturers and many others moving toward.