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Acquisitions, Multi- and Hybrid Cloud, growth of Cloud Managed Services, containers and green initiatives marked a dynamic year in Cloud Computing.

Cloud Computing continued to be one of the hottest topics in the technology and business media throughout 2018. This is no surprise as the Cloud Sector has been growing rapidly for the last few years. According to IDC, almost half of IT spending will be cloud-based in 2018, “reaching 60% of all IT infrastructure and 60-70% of all software, services and technology spending by 2020.”

So, while steady growth was perhaps expected this year, a few trends of note stand out. When the experts look back at 2018, they will likely stress the following for Cloud Computing trends that shaped the year and will continue to be important in 2019.

• Acquisitions: Massive growth is occurring as companies migrate from private to public Cloud. This spurred much M&A activity in 2018 and will likely continue into 2019.There is also a clear trend of enterprises buying “Born in the Cloud,” public Cloud focused MSPs and ISVs, as that’s where the lack of enterprise expertise lies. Examples include Cox buying Rapidscale, HPE buying Cloud Technology Partners and Rackspace buying Datapipe. While this trend has been prevalent throughout the year, the last few months of 2018 has seen the Cloud Management Platform (CMP) space go into overdrive as VMware acquired CloudHealth, Apptio acquired FittedCloud, and Flexera acquired Rightscale (among others).
• Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud: Once predicted as the future, Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud has truly arrived this year. Most enterprises (74 percent) described their strategy as Hybrid/Multi-Cloud in 2018. In addition, 62 percent of public Cloud adopters are using 2+ unique Cloud environments/platforms. These numbers will only go up in 2019. While this offers plenty of advantages to organizations looking to benefit from different Cloud capabilities, using more than one CSP complicates governance, cost optimization, and Cloud Management further as native CSP tools are not Multi-Cloud. As Cloud Computing costs remain a primary concern, it’s crucial for organizations to stay ahead with insight into Cloud usage trends to manage spend (and prevent waste).
• Growth of Managed Services: The global Cloud Managed Services market grew rapidly in 2018 and is expected to reach USD 82.51 billion by 2025, according to a study conducted by Grand View Research, Inc. Enterprises are focusing on their primary business operations, which results in higher Cloud Managed Services adoption. Business services, security services, network services, data center services, and mobility services are major categories in the Cloud Managed Services market. Implementation of these services will help enterprises reduce IT and operations costs and will also enhance productivity of those enterprises.
• Containers Become Mainstream: Application containerization is more than just a new buzz-word in Cloud Computing; it is changing the way in which resources are deployed into the Cloud. More and more companies utilized containers in 2018. This is another trend that will likely continue into 2019 and beyond.
• Going Green: Throughout 2018, we have seen a lot of articles about the Big Three cloud providers and their efforts to be environmentally friendly and make Cloud Computing What are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) doing to make their IaaS services as green as possible? It seems the Cloud Providers are focused on using renewable energy like solar and wind to power their massive data centers and are very actively touting that fact. Yet another benefit of moving resources to the Cloud!

Business continued to move to the Cloud in 2018 and the five trends described above showed that the sector is growing – sometimes in unpredictable ways. The next year will, no doubt, also contain some surprises. But the trend for expansion of the Cloud and related services is unmistakable for the foreseeable future.