Cloud Computing Growth and Opportunities: For many companies, the hybrid-cloud approach serves as an interim step in the long process of digital transformation.
Due to several factors, including a reliance on legacy systems and the need to comply with corporate regulations, many organizations have opted to place their workloads on both private and public clouds.
In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2020, 90 percent of organizations will adopt hybrid infrastructure management.
In addition to hybrid cloud, enterprises are increasingly adopting multicloud solutions that combine cloud services from multiple providers.
According to a 2019 Kentik report, 58 percent of businesses are already using a combination of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud in their multicloud networks.
A multicloud approach enables companies to assess the strengths and weaknesses of several vendors before committing for the longer term.
Multicloud can also help organizations optimize costs and avoid vendor lock-in issues.
The good news is that cloud providers are developing capabilities that allow companies to operate seamlessly across multiple environments.
Many companies, however, still harbor serious reservations about utilizing public clouds—a major reason hybrid clouds have become so popular.
According to a recent FileCloud report, 50 percent of companies don’t plan on moving mission-critical workloads to the public cloud.
In addition, Symantec reports that more than half of organizations face challenges in protecting their workloads—and fear that the maturity of their security might not keep pace with their cloud adoption.
This growing concern about cloud security presents providers with a unique opportunity. In many cases, cloud providers possess far greater security capabilities and expertise than most businesses could ever hope to develop themselves.
For this reason, security has become a key driver of hybrid cloud adoption. Cloud-based security solutions continue to gain traction across many industries, especially in financial services, government, and other highly regulated sectors.
As we pointed out last year, cloud-based solutions also provide the most popular path for acquiring AI capabilities. Increasingly, enterprises are viewing AI as essential to their continued innovation and growth.
Deloitte’s “Global State of AI in the Enterprise, 2nd Edition” survey found that AI early adopters consider this technology to be “very” or “critically” important to their company’s success today.
The percentage of executives rating AI as “critically important” is expected to surge globally over the next two years.
As a result, they’re investing in AI—and getting a return. In fact, 51 percent of our survey respondents expected to boost their AI investments by 10 percent or more in 2019, and 80 percent indicated that their AI investments had driven ROIs of 10 percent or more.
According to our survey, the primary AI benefits to date have been “enhancing products and services” and “optimizing internal business operations.”
In the coming year, companies will likely also increasingly implement AI for managing customer interactions, developing and testing products, personalizing products and services, delivering connected equipment, and enabling deeper involvement of personal assistants in consumers’ day-to-day activities.
With the explosion of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, combined with the increased portability of computing power and AI-driven tools, the time is right for edge computing to experience significant growth.
Consider this: according to Gartner, companies generated a modest 10 percent of their data outside a data center or cloud in 2019; this amount is expected to reach 75 percent in the next six years.
As a result, IDC predicts that in three years, 45 percent of IoT-generated data will be stored, processed, analyzed, and acted upon close to or at the edge of networks.
This will largely be driven by IoT applications across industries like manufacturing, retail, health care, energy, financial services, logistics, and agriculture. read full pdf here
