Cloud continues its march as more and more CIOs look at how they can best use the technology to transform and reach strategic business goals. Here we look at ten trends that will further change the cloud landscape in 2018.
1. Cloud computing will exceed 50% adoption
Analyst firm Forrester predicts that more than 50% of global enterprises will rely on at least one public cloud platform to digitally transform and push business initiatives.
2. Cloud to the edge
There will be a rise in so called Edge Computing, where data processing is performed at the edge of the network to optimize cloud computing. Analyst firm IDC forecasts that up to 40% of all compute will happen at the edge over the next couple of years.
3. Public vs private cloud
The public vs private cloud match will continue, with public cloud continuing to increase its share. Cisco predicts that by 2020, 68 percent of workloads will be in public data centers, against 32 percent in private cloud data centers.
4. Cloud driver for SD-WAN adoption
SD-WAN’s appeal is in its ability to optimize and secure connections to the cloud and to take the complexity out of managing dynamic workloads. Respondents in a 451 Research survey ranked improved cloud or Internet performance as a top-three impetus for rolling out SD-WAN.
5. Cloud security concerns
Securing data and applications in the cloud is imperative as more mission-critical apps and valuable data is moved to the cloud. Forrester predicts spending on global cloud security solutions to reach $3.5 billion by 2021 – an annual growth rate of 28 percent over the next four years.
6. Ransomware to hit the cloud
Ransomware targeting cloud services is set to be one of the biggest cybersecurity threats this year, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Review, as cybercriminals go all out to break into these virtual data safes.
7. Growth in containers to accelerate
The application container market may be a small part of the overall cloud-enabling technology market, but expect it to accelerate fast as enterprises realize the benefit of easy portability. 451 Research believes the technology will post a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40 percent through 2020.
8. Multi-cloud popularity
Multi-cloud environments will gain momentum as enterprises look to adopt the right mix of cloud models and services to best suit their business objectives. 451 Research forecasts that almost two-thirds of organizations will adopt multi-cloud by 2019.
9. GDPR and the cloud
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect May 25, 2018. It will bring with it some cloud compliance challenges, given that the average enterprise uses over 900 cloud apps, according to Symantec.
10. Strategic adoption of cloud required
The impact of cloud on enterprise IT strategies is now so important that there will be no separate cloud strategy running in parallel with the IT strategy. They will become one and the same. “Organizations need to invest in their understanding and take a long-term view of this evolving space. Organizations that take a comprehensive structured approach to their cloud transition strategy will win,” says Erik Berggren, VP of Cloud Transition Strategies at IDC.
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Jan has been writing about technology for over 22 years for magazines and web sites, including ComputerActive, IQ magazine and Signum. She has been a business correspondent on ComputerWorld in Sydney and covered the channel for Ziff-Davis in New York.