As we usher in a brand new decade, there is one inevitable thing: the adoption of cloud computing will continue to skyrocket as more and more businesses look to embrace the many benefits it can offer.
For a lot of businesses, from accountants to acoustic consultants, having a hybrid-cloud approach in the meantime can serve as a good jumping-off point for the long and gruelling process of digital transformation and complete adoption. A lot of businesses have looked to leverage workloads on both private and public clouds due to the heavy reliance that businesses have on legacy systems and due to the need to work within the confines of various corporate regulations. Gartner predicted that by 2020, as many as 90% of all organisations would have adopted hybrid infrastructure management.
The Hybrid Cloud
Along with the addition of the hybrid cloud environment, many companies are looking to adopt multi-cloud solutions that look to combine all of the services from a range of cloud providers. In fact, according to a Kentik report in 2019, as many as 58% of companies are already utilising a combination of Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services in their networks. This type of approach offers businesses the ability to effectively analyse the different pros and cons of each cloud provider to identify the right fit before committing to one or the other.
Many companies are still holding back and harbour some reservations about utilising a cloud approach. In fact, according to a report by FileCloud, as many as 50% of businesses don’t look to move mission-critical workloads to the public cloud. Likewise, Symantec reports that over 50% of different businesses face substantial challenges to protect their workloads and don’t believe their security is up to the task of handling it at the same rate they are implementing cloud adoption.
Security Concerns
This increasing issue that businesses have about the security of their own abilities have given providers ample opportunity to fill the gaps. In a lot of cases, providers are much more capable of handling security and they offer greater expertise in this area than businesses would be able to develop and implement on their own. Because of this, security has become one of the main driving forces behind the adoption of hybrid clouds. These solutions continue to increase in value among a lot of industries that rely on heavy security including highly regulated sectors like financial services and even the Government.
As we address last year, these solutions are providing the easiest path with the least amount of resistance for companies to gain artificial intelligence capabilities. A lot of companies are looking at AI as a means to help them innovate and scale. Deloitte had a survey that showcased that the early adopters of AI technology considered it to be either “very” or “critically” important to the overall success of their company in today’s digital landscape. The expected percentage of executives to increase their answer to “critically important” is expected to increase exponentially over the next couple of years.
Benefits of AI
The main benefits of AI thus far have been to enhance products and services and to optimise business operations internally. Within the next year, many businesses are likely going to be implementing AI to better manage customer relationships, develop and test products, personalise products and services, and even improve more personal assistances in consumer’s daily activities.
With the surge in interest in the Internet of Things devices and the enhanced portability of AI-driven tools, there has never been a better time for edge computing to boom in terms of growth potential. In fact, according to Gartner, businesses were able to generate a very modest 10% of their data outside a cloud or data centre in the year 2019, whereas, this number is anticipated to skyrocket to around 75% within the near 6 years.
We will continue to see increasing high-capacity and low latency processing capabilities on portable and fixed networks that leverage AI to offer an enhanced end-user experience. The benefits of this type of computing are far-reaching with the ability to impact everything from distribution networks to factories and even autonomous vehicles.
