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Today, company executives do not look at the cloud simply as a tool for leveraging their infrastructures. Rather, they are more interested in finding out ways to use cloud computing technologies for strategizing business goals for the year 2018. The increased rate of cloud adoption is expected to drive unprecedented growth in public cloud hosting services where the market is expected to touch $184 billion. This is almost a 21.4% increase from last year when market had attained the $153 billion mark. Market is again expected to be twice the revenue by end of 2021.
The investments in cloud computing involve important decisions centering on security, innovations and ROI which are necessary to transform any business. While the public cloud can provide cost benefits as infrastructure is being shared, private clouds offer better security and data availability because of dedicated resources for individual organizations. Hybrid clouds provide a mix of both deployments and can be optimized for security, costs and performance according to an organization’s needs. So, the hybrid market is now expected to grow rapidly, with nearly 90% of companies investing in this model by the end of this decade. In contrast, the private cloud is expected to grow at a more relaxed pace but it will gain value in IT investment-related decisions since businesses want secure and dependable alternatives to on-premise data centers.
What are the trends in cloud growth predicted for 2018?
– According to reports by Gartner, there will be 4 types of cloud hosting services in the future, namely, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and BPaaS or Business Process as a Service. According to studies, this BPaaS market is going to evolve at a slow rate compared to the other services as far as annual revenues are concerned. This is mainly because a large portion of the BPaaS clients are SMBs which have fewer needs for cloud business processes. The public cloud services on the other hand, will expand significantly and dominate the industry because of low-cost SaaS solutions.
– As far as security goes, according to Gartner, there will be more focus on cloud security solutions for running critical applications or performance-driven workloads. Just because there is on-site datacenter deployment does not mean that there is robust security or that the cloud is a safer alternative. At the same time, if you forgo control to a third party cloud provider, it will not mean compromising your security capabilities. In PaaS and IaaS cases, where the organizations are finally responsible for securing workloads, growth of security service market reveals that this industry is coming out with effective ways to enable businesses to maximize the true potential of their public clouds.
– So, according to reports from Bain & Co, Statistica and KPMG, all these four types of cloud services, namely SaaS, IaaS, PaaS and BPaaS will expand aggressively. While SaaS is subscription based and mainly dominated by players like Salesforce or Google Apps, very soon new players will join the competition. Growth rates for PaaS are also impressive and it is expected to increase to almost 56% by 2020. The IaaS market which is currently dominated by Azure, AWS, GCE or Google Computer Engine is also expected to cross $17 billion by end of 2018.
– While a total of nearly 370 Exabyte data is currently stored in global data centers the capacity is expected to increase to about 1.1 ZB or Zettabytes by 2018 which is almost double the storage capacity of the previous year.
– Another important trend noticeable in 2018 will be server-less computing. So, developers can now create and operate applications without having to manage any infrastructure. This technology requires less time and less efforts and the release of updates is also less complex.
– Cloud-based containers are another trend to watch out for in 2018. These are alternatives to virtual machines and allow apps to get deployed in a rather quick and direct manner. This technology provides for faster release of software modules and guarantees better security.
– Artificial Intelligence of AI and Machine Learning or ML will also take center stage this year. Key players in this industry include IBM, Google and Microsoft which are making use of such technologies to offer cloud-based solutions for driving business growth.
– Finally, there is the growth of the fifth-generation or 5G network which is expected to dominate in 2018. Since volumes of data generated every day is constantly on the rise, it is important to accelerate Internet speeds. So, network providers are all working for a faster and improved connection for supporting cloud solutions.
So, from a business point of view, companies are mainly concentrating on automation and agility for facilitating quicker time to value. They are shifting all mission-critical apps to the cloud in order to address business needs for faster computing and scalability. With the public cloud hosting services, this is possible because it gives flexibility to scale up resources on demand. This is why public clouds are growing more and more in value for smaller businesses. These technologies are helping more and more SMBs and start-ups to compete against big businesses in terms of innovations. They can focus better on their key business offerings rather than having to spend resources and time on scaling up the infrastructure.
Sanjay Poddar is a prolific writer whose in-depth knowledge on tech sector and curiosity to explore the unexplored has helped him to become an asset to the company. Apart from technology, he has covered various domains that he is keen to explore.