As businesses become more agile to the current situation, there is a significant rise in cloud migration. As a result, SaaS vendors have seen an increase in customers.
The year 2020 was the year of adapting to the changed way of life due to the pandemic. It led to a shift to remote working. Consequently, organisations had made hasty cloud migration decisions. Cloud migration made in such a little time tends to be more unorganised. The year 2021 is, therefore, said to be the year of cleansing for such organisations.
The migration to the cloud in 2021 isn’t going to slow down as businesses are strategising to leverage the cloud demand. Vendors will reap benefits from this too. SaaS vendors have benefited from mass-scale remote work that has also caused a boom in the cloud market. It is expected to see a rise in cloud infrastructure deployments and spending to accommodate efficient remote working outside the traditional office environment.
For the second successive year, Cloud has made it to the top three ranks for businesses’ IT investment priorities. With business continuity as the main motive, other priorities fell to the wayside in 2020. In 2021, organizations are preparing to opt for cloud solution in every department. 4 new cloud trends to watch out for are:
Getting Rid of Unnecessary cloud workloads
An unplanned movement to the cloud results in a ‘lift and shift’ model where complete application is pushed to the cloud. It is an outdated strategy that exhausts your cloud storage capacity and levies an unnecessary burden on the cloud.
Till June 2020, 40% of businesses were rushing to migrate to the cloud. But in this rush, the cloud has not been used judiciously. It is found that as much as 93% of the businesses have misconfigured cloud storage services.
Proper planning and reconfiguring the cloud will minimize your costs, reduce burden, and maximize profits in the long-term. Using a public cloud was a necessity to survive in the pandemic time. But moving forward, businesses must check other models such as the hybrid cloud as ideal for operations.
The task of weighing the pros and cons of the cloud is not a duty of the IT department only. Cloud knowledge has become more mainstream now. Management and Leadership members must watch closely to ensure cloud decisions benefiting their departments too.
Rethinking Cloud Governance
Security has been on the top charts for businesses. They are thinking of restructuring cloud governance to strengthen their cloud strategy.
Moving to the clouds’ foundation and developing a good governance plan will help businesses fortify their security infrastructure to rectify the hasty cloud adoption. IT departments are working to level up cloud security. In July, about 96% of the 3500 respondents to a Sophos survey raised an eyebrow over cloud security.
Everybody was under the impression that VPN would withstand the burden of remote working of the entire workforce. However, they failed to notice that working on different laptops and different networks is a roadblock while working on the VPN.
Any business related to banking or financial service is looking to secure their workloads. Planned cyber attacks have forced organizations to ramp up cloud security strategies to avoid becoming the next prey. Hybrid cloud is one of the best solutions as it balances both security and cost.
More Cloud Investments
As businesses are largely adopting the cloud, vendors are stepping up to share the wealth.
Cloud businesses were among top-notch performers with a growing market for their services in the year 2020. This year it is expected that the global public cloud infrastructure will grow 35% to $120 billion, says Dave Bartoletti, vice president, and principal analyst at Forrester.
Companies have ramped up their acquisitions to reposition them into SaaS. That helped in surviving and capitalizing on the new ways of working and living in the pandemic-stricken world.
Recently, to sustain more market growth, the new Covid-19 legislation is signed into law in December. This law equips businesses with the resources for continuing in the cloud investments. The paycheck protection program is also updated to include allowances for software and cloud upgrades for qualified companies.
Mega vendors are continuing their reign. More than 50% of respondents of the Flexera Survey will increase their investments in Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Salesforce, Google, and other cloud services. Microsoft Azure is ruling as the top choice.
Training the Workforce
While Vendors and Cloud investments are growing, cloud computing companies focus on spreading technical knowledge with free trainings.
In 2021, we will see more multi-cloud strategies with a wide range of training initiatives from both enterprises and cloud service providers. Businesses are keen to train cloud architects and professionals as they play a crucial role in the migration of applications to the cloud.
Microsoft and AWS will train over 20 million people on the cloud. It will boost entry-level cloud knowledge in the future. It will also allow advanced cloud technologists to innovate and reinvent.
Such a cloud boom will pave the way for transformation. Edge computing is more likely to rise. In the coming years, cloud innovation will mean ‘while core data centers will remain essential, the volume will increasingly focus on edge devices operating on AI’, says Brandon Ebken, CTO at Insight Enterprises.
How your organisation is coping with this cloudification of the application? Please let us know through comments. For cloud-related assistance, reach out to us at - contact.us@virtuetechinc.com