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When it comes to cloud technology, more and more businesses are realizing the benefits that cloud can provide them and are beginning to seek more cloud solutions to conduct their business activities. And obviously, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, IBM, Cisco, VMWare and Oracle plan to capture this spend by providing a dizzying array of IaaS, PaaS, and DaaS offerings to help enterprises build and run their services.
With that in mind, here are some cloud computing trends I foresee for 2021:
Cloud Automation Tools: as modern IT environments continue to become more diverse and distributed in the pursuit of key business goals, they also bear new challenges for the operation teams responsible for keeping everything running smoothly. The go-to strategy for taming the associated complexity can be summed up in one word – automation.
Automation tools, including some that incorporate AI, will be on the rise in 2021. These new automation capabilities, along with comprehensive dashboards that provide a holistic view into multi-cloud operations, will become increasingly important for cloud and IT operations to support the lines of business regardless of where they place their workloads.
Desktop as a service (DaaS): DaaS spend is expected to increase 95.4% to $1.2 billion this year and we will likely see this growth expand into next year as well. DaaS offers an inexpensive option for enterprises that are supporting the surge of remote workers due to the global pandemic and their need to securely access enterprise applications from multiple devices and locations.
Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud: Once predicted as the future, the multi- and hybrid cloud world has arrived and will continue to grow. Most enterprises (93 percent) described their strategy as multi-cloud in 2020 according to a Flexera report (up 21% from 2018) and 87% have a hybrid cloud strategy. In addition, 71 percent of public cloud adopters are using 2+ unique cloud environments/platforms. These numbers will only go up in 2021. 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) and optimize application performance.
It’s a complex problem, but we do see many organizations adopting a multi-cloud strategy with cost control and governance in mind, as it avoids vendor lock-in and allows flexibility for deploying workloads in the most cost-efficient manner (and at a high level, keeps the cloud providers competitive against each other to continually lower prices).
Growth of Managed Services: The global cloud managed services market is growing rapidly and is expected to reach $116B billion by 2025, growing from $62.4B in 2020 according to a study conducted by Markets and Markets. 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.
Cloud has been and will continue to be a disruptive force in enterprise IT for years to come. Future technology trends in cloud computing will continue to shape the way enterprises leverage public, private and hybrid cloud. The trends listed above promise to earn many headlines in 2021.