Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining

Thankfully, the major players in the technology sector have stepped up to provide us all with the necessary tools and resources to quickly adapt to this change of workstyle and provided frameworks to collaboratively work to the same, or a higher level, as if we were all still working from the same buildings in what now seems our previous lives. On top of this, it’s provided employees with better work-life balances, a more flexible approach to working hours, and less time spent commuting to offices and meetings, thus increasing productivity.  

Although the pandemic now seems all but a distant memory, it appears this new modern way of working is here to stay, and this is mainly backed by the power of modern cloud computing. 

So what is the cloud? 

At a very high level, the cloud is essentially a resource or a collection of resources hosted by a third party. The ‘service provider’ will aim to host a product ‘as-a-service’ or aim to add some form of value to a product whilst simultaneously hosting a single product, or a collection of products, again - ‘as-a-service’. 

Software-as-Service (SaaS) – Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace applications, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) – Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, are a couple of examples of major public as-a-service cloud products and solutions. Furthermore, IT companies are adopting the demand for the cloud appetite and developing private cloud services, built in-house.  

What are the benefits of cloud computing? 

Cloud services provide many benefits for businesses and IT in comparison to the old school traditional on-premises way of working, such as: 

• On-demand scalability for additional resources 
• Potential cost savings due to on-demand scalable-down capabilities 
• Accessible anywhere flexibilities 
• Increased availability 
• Reduction of points of failure 
• OPEX pricing models 
• Lower management requirements 
• Shorter contract commitments 
• Lower operation considerations 

Although in the world of IT, cloud computing may sound like the best thing since sliced bread, it does bring IT management and engineers other considerations and challenges. 

Cloud Adoption and Challenges 

As of 2021, public cloud revenue generated approximately $400 billion, this doesn’t take into consideration private cloud services companies may also have adopted. Rough estimates also anticipate that 83% of enterprise workloads are now in the cloud, 30% of IT budgets are allocated to cloud computing, 66% of businesses have employed a cloud service team department, and 50% of businesses spend more than $1.2 million on cloud services annually. By 2025 it is expected that cloud computing revenue is to generate $917 billion, finally overtaking traditional IT infrastructure spending. With that in mind, we can see the direction the market is heading. However, as mentioned, cloud computing is not all singing and dancing and does provide some additional challenges for IT teams such as: 

• Security and privacy 
• Portability 
• Interoperability 
• Compute performance 

This has given software vendors opportunities to further develop products, and accelerated the hunger for these products, at times layering technologies on top of native cloud applications or services, to combat these issues.  

Cloud may also be intimidating for some, or not be an option due to incompatibilities or compute scalability which is commonly due to a lack of knowledge or understanding of what cloud infrastructure is, or how powerful it is. Some line of business application vendors, for example - can misunderstand the capabilities of cloud computing. Using SQL as an example – front end applications may not natively integrate with SQL-as-a-Service in Microsoft Azure, but we can deploy Infrastructure as a Service with SQL as an installation, which technically operates the same as if on-premises. 

Current Cloud Trends 

During the pandemic, there was a huge surge for businesses to migrate to the cloud due to the flexibility it provides. Understandably the almost overnight requirement for cloud and its benefits came almost as a knee jerk reaction to the situation we found ourselves in, perhaps not allowing organisations to plan an IT strategy as robust as they would hope for, under normal circumstances. Now the dust has settled, it seems organisations are looking to optimise their cloud computing usage, and additionally spend. Modern enterprises are focused on optimising cloud environments, rightsizing cloud environments, leveraging consumption intelligence to plan cloud migrations and looking at the best ways to optimise their bang for their buck. Additionally, further cloud will continue to be adopted as organisations enter the end of multi-year contracts – CoLo/DC hosting for example and will look to migrate to the public cloud. 

Future Cloud Trends 

Over the next 1-3 years, as contracts with existing providers approach their end date, we can only expect further cloud adoptions for organisations IT usage. Factor in the additional costs of overheads (skyrocketing IT salaries, and the rising cost of energy and fuel), we can only expect this growing trend to continue until at least 2025. Furthermore, as software vendors create extra peace of mind within IT security, multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud, and single cloud adoptions are expected to continue to grow within businesses' IT strategies.