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The COVID-19 pandemic was an eye-opener for several enterprises that realized that years of stagnating policies and outdated business processes caused the entire business to come to a grinding halt when such pandemics erupt out of the blue. Those that digitally transformed their operations earlier leveraged technology to enable their workforce to conduct business seamlessly and create new digital channels for their consumers to transact with them virtually.
The massive growth in e-commerce, streaming services, home delivery of food, grocery, and all other essential items, and the rise of virtual collaboration platforms for remotely working employees were the most common sightings during the pandemic.
A core technology that helped build this digital fortress of support for businesses and consumers during the pandemic is cloud computing. In the first quarter of 2020, global cloud spending rose to over USD 29 Billion.
Read: How to Build a Rock-Solid Cloud Strategy
As we draw near to the closing days of 2020, it is time to see where cloud computing can take us in the coming year.
Let us explore five cloud computing trends to look forward to in 2021
Serverless becomes the new favorite
One of the five fastest-growing PaaS cloud services in 2020, serverless computing will achieve greater heights in 2021. We will witness a paradigm shift in application development. When this process is done independently, it can support the serverless cloud platform by configuring it to work along with the application design. In 2021, this trend is set to be reversed, and enterprises will focus on building and deploying applications that work with powerful serverless cloud platforms on offer by leading cloud providers.
Diversification from a one-stop-shop approach
Leading cloud vendors like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, etc., have been trying to onboard as many enterprise systems of a business into their cloud services. It allows them to control all facets of an organization’s digital infrastructure, such as computing, storage, and data management. However, businesses have slowly started moving into a multi-cloud hybrid environment to ensure better interoperability of their digital assets with their large network of partner and vendor systems hosted on different cloud environments. With a hybrid model, it becomes easier for them to share data and information amongst partners that follow various other applications, data standards, and architectures. We may even see a good number of startups exclusively focus on creating simplified services that unify the operations of digital systems across multiple cloud environments.
Read: Why Hybrid Cloud Is Popular Amongst Financial Services Companies
Edge computing to start showing signs of becoming mainstream
By 2021, studies show that the number of connected devices, is expected to exceed 46 billion globally. With an increase in connections, the scalability of the underlying digital infrastructure also needs a massive upgrade to ensure seamless performance. Traditional cloud-based services will have to transition into a more accommodative edge computing model where connected devices collaborate with cloud services hosted closer to their actual localized deployment areas. Public clouds work out of an entirely different approach by relying on massive data centers that supply the desired cloud capacity on demand. Distributed service layers that form the core of edge computing are expected to be more common in 2021. This will lay the ground for more mainstream use cases of edge computing slowly arising across business domains.
AI will be the cloud’s best friend
From optimizing capacity allocation to deciding the rate at which data center cooling infrastructure needs to work to fulfill assigned workloads, AI algorithms and Machine Learning will be at the heart of all cloud initiatives in 2021. The already large portfolio of application services created by major players as well as others, which are available as plug-and-play capabilities in modern-day cloud environments, will further see an expansion of capacity, more diversified applications, and optimal utilization. And, all of them will be monitored and managed autonomously by AI algorithms.
Fortifying security
Increased cloud penetration, more remote workers, and more consumers for cloud services are positive signs of growth in the cloud business. But with massive growth comes even greater challenges in the form of cyber threats. Enterprises will need to invest heavily in upgrading their enterprise firewalls and protection mechanisms. They will have a large arsenal of weapons to leverage, like creating awareness about data sharing and privacy amongst staff members to deploying advanced AI-based cloud security monitoring platforms to enable a risk-free cloud work environment.
Read: Keeping Security at the Center of Your Cloud Strategy
Gartner reports that by the end of 2020, the estimated growth of cloud spending by enterprises worldwide is 19% despite the 8% fall predicted for IT spending as a whole in a year. As businesses of all sizes turn to digital transformation to survive in the post-COVID era, they cannot ignore the enormous potential cloud computing has to help them achieve and exceed their digital ambitions.
