CloudCheckr has assessed the cloud computing trends over the past 12 months and has made several cloud computing predictions for 2018.
It has now been 10 years since Amazon released its AWS public cloud, and while in the early years adoption of the cloud was relatively slow, now the benefits of the public cloud have been made apparent and many businesses are now migrating to the cloud. By 2020, the cloud is expected to generate more revenue than the sale of on-premises IT solutions.
CloudCheckr believes on-premises IT will not be disappearing any time soon, as there are many situations when on-premises IT presents a better option, such as the handling of certain regulated data, which the firm believes is likely to remain in house. The decision where to locate workloads that can easily be run in the cloud or on-premises will largely be decided based on cost, the workloads they interact with, and various human factors.
Bulk Data Computational Analysis tools are expected to be totally cloud based, as the cloud is much better suited to working with large data sets. Many specialist BDCA services now only available through the cloud and CloudCheckr predicts these big data services will continue to drive growth in the cloud market over the coming year.
A major area of growth in 2018 is cloud security. Cloud Security Gateways (CSGs) and Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASBs) are security layers between applications, services, networks, and end users. CSGs and CASBs are being adopted by organizations to ensure the security of cloud-based email and CRM solutions, and to protect against exfiltration of data. 2018 is expected to see rapid and widespread adoption of these services.
There has been a growing trend in the adoption of multi-cloud strategies, which is likely to continue throughout 2018 as competition between cloud service providers increases and businesses seek solutions that are beyond the capability of a single public cloud provider.
GDPR compliance is a key issue in 2018, with the EU directive starting to be enforced in May 2018. Any organization that does business in the EU or with EU residents is required to comply with GDPR and the coming months are likely to see many companies focused on compliance and developing solutions that allow them to implement rules and monitor changes across multiple providers.
Due to the complexity of managing multi-cloud environments, there is likely to be greater adoption of cloud management solutions that provide visibility into security, usage, and potential cost saving opportunities.
