Four Emerging Trends in Cloud Computing - Gartner 2021 Says The Importance of Data Is Paramount

 Gartner in its recent study predicts that overall global end-user spending on Public Cloud Services Expected to Exceed $480 Billion Next Year. In a note released in August 2021 it says, that the four new trends in cloud computing are continuing to expand the breadth of cloud offerings and capabilities, accelerating growth across all segments in the public cloud services market, according to Gartner, Inc. The four trends are: cloud ubiquity, regional cloud ecosystems, sustainability and carbon-intelligent cloud, and cloud infrastructure and platform service (CIPS) providers’ automated programmable infrastructure.

Gartner forecasts end-user spending on public cloud services to reach $396 billion in 2021 and grow 21.7% to reach $482 billion in 2022 (see Table 1). Additionally, by 2026, Gartner predicts public cloud spending will exceed 45% of all enterprise IT spending, up from less than 17% in 2021. Scalable database management systems (DBMS) for intensive application workloads and decision support systems specifically descriptive and in-depth analytics will become, the most critical aspect of cloud infrastructure based economy.  The findings did emerge out of the Department of Computer Science, University of California.  The fellow members of the university also assert that  owing success of data management solutions in the prevalent cloud environment, series of solution based research is important.  

Future of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is in its nascent stage today and pose several issues and opportunities in tandem. Cloud computing is expected to generate more than half of the total revenue from cloud related services, Cloudcomputing.org has revealed in its survey.  Also known as utility computing or virtual servers on the web, cloud based services is the talk of the future and will change the way IT has functioned traditionally. Importantly, smooth transition of  applications from traditional traditional enterprise is a challenge indeed. 

Challenges and Possible Solutions Cloud Computing As Security

Amazon's (AWS) has been a pioneer in cloud related services since 2006.  There are some fresh challenges cloud computing security technologists will face. We will also discuss possible solutions to successfully tackle them. Malwares in Mobile: There is a sharp increase in Malaware attacks (a rise of over 70%), especially on Mobile/Cellular computing operating platforms, McAfee reported in ten years ago. We all can assume that cellular technology will comprise a substantial part of technology (cloud). Hence, vendors need to take extra care to tackle the issue. Web 2.0: As previously discussed, cloud vendors, high infrastructure companies and companies are not only facing incident breaches and issues, they are also ill equipped to handle new set of problems and issues the web 2.0 will unleash, while at using it.  Incident Response: Any kind of abnormalities in collecting and assimilating data such as data breaches, suspicious intrusion detection alerts is known as an incident response. As an organisation grows, issues like intrusion detection systems and firewalls too add a substantial problem in cloud computing. Cloud computing security should have quick a mechanism in place to check incident response time aided by an expert team to solve such problems.  

Regional Cloud Ecosystems

Growing geopolitical regulatory fragmentation, protectionism and industry compliance are driving the creation of new regional and vertical cloud ecosystems and data services. Companies in the financial and public sectors are looking to reduce critical lock-in and single points of failure with their cloud providers outside of their country. Regions not able to create or sustain their own platform ecosystems will have no choice but to leverage the platforms created in other regions and resort to legislation and regulation to maintain some level of control and sovereignty. Concerns among politicians, academia and tech providers in these regions are increasing, leading to initiatives such as GAIA-X in European countries.

Sustainability and “Carbon-Intelligent” Cloud

Nearly half of the respondents in the 2021 Gartner CEO Survey believe climate change mitigation will have a significant impact on their business. Cloud providers are responding to this growing focus on sustainability by instituting more aggressive carbon-neutral corporate goals, which creates new challenges for infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders. “New sustainability requirements will be mandated over the next few years and the choice of cloud services providers may hinge on the provider’s ‘green’ initiatives,” said Cecci. 

CIPS Providers’ Automated Programmable Infrastructure

Gartner expects the broad adoption of fully managed and artificial intelligence (AI)-/machine-learning (ML)-enabled cloud services from hyperscale CIPS providers. This will rapidly eliminate the operational burden of traditional I&O roles in the public cloud. “Infrastructure is becoming programmable, and its operation is subsequently becoming automated,” said Cecci. “Modern IT infrastructure, whether deployed in the data center or consumed in the public cloud, requires less manual intervention and routine administration than its legacy equivalents.” 

Security: We can witness a spurt of equipments and hardware getting more sophisticated every day. Security threats posed by certain malawares and hackers have also increased. Hardware form an inseparable part of the IT security, thus vendors should develop and initiate further R&D processes and create intelligent tamper proof equipments. A decade ago, a report prepared by the McKinsey Global Institute, predicted that the US would need at least need 140,000 to 190,000 additional workers with “deep analytical” expertise plus 1.5 million more data-literate managers. Now Data Science is at the helm and considered as the hottest job of the century. Considering the analysis being made, the time has arrived to not just gear up with the current demand and supply of cloud security professional but also be prepared to novel challenges IT will pose in years to come.