2020 has been a year of great learning for enterprises in a unique way. It is the year technology became the superhero by helping companies effectively deal with the all-pervasive uncertainty and global crisis.
Amid these challenging times, cloud computing emerged as the biggest boon for enterprises. Cloud was, in many ways, like a rising tide that lifted all boats. It allowed businesses of all sizes and natures to enable business continuity mechanisms when the pandemic struck rapidly. The most prominent case is how millions of workers were moved to a ‘work-from-home’ model in a relatively short period.
Various market reports predict the cloud market will undergo unprecedented growth next year and beyond. The Deloitte annual report predicts that “global cloud spending will grow 7x faster than overall IT spend and revenue growth will remain greater than 30% for 2021 through 2025 as companies migrate to the cloud to save money, become more agile and drive innovation”.
Much of this growth will likely be attributed to the public cloud. According to Forrester Research, the global public cloud infrastructure market is predicted to grow 35% to $120 billion in 2021.
Here are three significant trends that will continue to amp up the cloud computing market in 2021:
1. Resilience. Adaptability. Agility:
One of the most essential takeaways businesses had in 2020 is that ‘uncertainty’ is at the core of what we call the ‘new normal’. Nobody knows how long we will continue to work from home, learn remotely, prefer digital healthcare and shop/play online. The only thing that businesses can be sure of is the ‘instability’ and be prepared for change.
It also means that organizations need to relook at and invest in three key pillars to thrive in the new world order—resilience, adaptability, and agility. And these three pillars will be built on the solid foundation of the cloud, which allows businesses to operate during disruption, scale up rapidly when volumes peak and stay flexible as the market demand fluctuates.
Not just that, IT departments worldwide had to relook at the way they bought, deployed, managed and consumed technology over the years. And the cloud has been instrumental in shaping some of these trends that will likely prevail well into the post-pandemic era. Quite visibly, these will be part of organizations’ long-term strategies as they navigate the new normal.
2. The year of cloud-native:
The changing market dynamics and the need to stay agile and adaptable will further drive the adoption of containerization and cloud-native apps in 2021. IDC predicts that over 500 million Digital apps and services will be developed and deployed using Cloud-native approaches. Kubernetes in production is expected to go mainstream in 2021 as enterprises strive to roll out applications and services in record time.
This also means that cloud-native security will take centre stage in the coming year as more threats will be directed at compromising app data. Subsequently, we will see the importance of DevSecOp going up significantly in 2021.
3. “Edge” over data centre:
The edge computing market is predicted to boom in 2021 due to the proliferation of private 5G networks and the increasing need for ultra-low latent intelligent edge applications. According to IDC, over 50% of new enterprise IT infrastructure deployed by 2023 will be at the edge rather than corporate data centres.
Personalized content & service delivery, increasing IoT use cases, intelligent factories etc., will push up the need for edge infrastructure. The media & entertainment industry alone will generate a large chunk of the edge computing market in the new normal where gaming, music, video and much more will be streamed in real-time.
Many industry experts, however, believe that edge will likely eat into cloud computing spending. In reality, 2021 will see these technologies complementing and co-existing to deliver a real-time experience to customers. Rather than existing as two siloed components, both cloud and edge computing technologies will be leveraged for their respective advantages to fulfil changing customer demands.
Besides these broad trends, the cloud will serve as the de-facto platform on which several radical changes driven by the pandemic are fulfilled and delivered. Indeed, a new era of cloud has just dawned!
