Top Cloud Computing Trends to Follow in 2021
Many predictions for 2021 have been turned on their head by the events of 2020. The way technology reshapes our lives in that year can also be characterized by top trends such as the Internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI). The most critical examples of these technological wonders are helping us to adapt and live in the changing times we are facing. To this end, no trend is more important than cloud computing. Cloud is the key component of the app-based, data-driven tech ecosystem that has been vital to helping us navigate this transformation. Cloud services have revolutionized everything, from contact tracing to the services for home delivery, remote medicine, and working from home. During the coronavirus pandemic, cloud infrastructure, which underpinned the economy of the world, remote workforces, and global supply chains, will continue to be an important objective for companies pursuing improved scalability, market sustainability, and cost-effectiveness 2021.
Dustin Milberg, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner and field chief technical officer for cloud computing at InterVision, said: "The effects of COVID-19 will continue throughout 2021, as companies will look to establish a framework for increased agility." "Because of its benefits of improved scalability, flexibility, and accessibility, the cloud will be a key focus in this area. We should expect to see the pace of this transition increase across 2021, as more organizations get to grips with the introduction of cloud models, and the distribution of cloud data to our devices becomes more useful for everyday lives. This is because getting to the cloud doesn't always mean you're going to have higher efficiency and expense.
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Steve Miller-Jones, vice president of edge planning and solution design at Limelight Networks, observed that the infrastructure needs of companies have grown in context during the past year, when workplaces became rapidly decentralized after the pandemic, with remote employees around the world. At the same time, current technological innovations make it easier for better organizational efficiency to process, generate, and evaluate data instantly," he said. "these requirements for operations are changing the manner businesses leverage cloud computing." Here are some of the innovations expected in cloud computing for 2021.
The Reshuffling of Top Suppliers of the Cloud
The 3 top suppliers of public cloud in 2021, will be reshuffled, with Alibaba Cloud of China displacing Google Cloud to claim the No. 3 revenue spot in the global market for cloud computing platforms. According to Forrester, behind #1 were Amazon Web Services and Microsoft.
As the work it has put into ERP (enterprise resource planning) analytics, workloads, and account management pay off in 2021, Google (Cloud) proves itself as a friendly cloud for enterprises," said Hyoun Park, chief analyst, and CEO at Amalgam Insights, a technology advisory firm in Berkeley, Calif., " Revenue from Google Cloud, which includes revenue from Google Cloud Platform (GCP), collaboration software from Google Workspace (formerly G Suite), and other corporate cloud services, rose to $3.44 billion, opposed to the last year’s same period $2.38 billion. Amalgam expects Google Cloud next year to reach healthy growth of 40-plus percent.
Amalgam, which reports that AWS combined has more revenue than its next three biggest competitors, expects AWS revenue to rise less than Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud combined in 2021. Instead of the dwarves vs. Amazon, the cloud market is finally a competitive one. Park said. According to Park, AWS will continue its success in delivering operations management services, developing on top of communications, messaging, and operations services such as Amazon Simple Queue Service, Amazon Chime, AWS RoboMaker, and AWS Chatbot.
Microsoft, meanwhile, in the fiscal year 2021, would surpass $25 billion in Azure cloud sales—driven by secular cloud customer needs and "partner confidence that Google and Amazon cannot match"—and potentially break out Azure business in its annual results, Park predicted.
The Market of Public Cloud Infrastructure Hits $120B Globally
According to Forrester’s Report, the global public cloud computing industry will rise in 2021, thirty-five percent to $120 billion as the recovery from the pandemic managed by the cloud. Forrester previously predicted that next year's public cloud computing demand will climb 28 percent to $113.1 billion. A research company said in its "Predictions 2021, before the pandemic, the good change to the cloud already proceeding at a healthy clip, will spike in 2021, yielding even greater enterprise adoption, revenue from business value and cloud providers,".
In 2021, the percentage of global IT spending allocated to the cloud will begin to accelerate. Gartner, the advisory and research firm based in Stamford, Conn., predicts that end-users globally public cloud spending will rise 18% next year to $304.9 billion, up from $257.5 billion this year.
"The pandemic has validated the value proposition of the cloud," Sid Nag, Gartner's research vice president, said in a briefing earlier this month. The ability to use on-demand, flexible cloud platforms to achieve cost savings and business continuity gives companies the strength to ramp up their digital business transformation strategies rapidly. More than ever, the increased usage of public cloud platforms has enhanced cloud adoption to be the 'new standard' today
According to Gartner, while software as a service (SaaS) will still be the biggest business market for end-user cloud IT spending, it is projected to rise by about 16 percent to $117.8 billion, application infrastructure services (PaaS) is projected to increase to about $55.5 billion at a higher 26.6% rate. PaaS development will be powered by the continued need for remote support to access high-performing and flexible technology across modernized and cloud-native applications, it said.
Said the senior cloud operations consultant at SPR, George Burns III, a technology modernization firm based in Chicago. It is expected that spending on cloud system infrastructure services (IaaS) would grow by 26.9 percent to $65.3 billion.
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Edge Is the New Cloud
Edge is the new cloud, and according to Forrester's forecasts, new edge providers will trim 5 points from public cloud development next year. According to Forrester, major providers such as HPE, Dell, IBM, and Intel are doubling down on the edge with cloud-like technologies that can be distributed anywhere, and content distribution networks and data center colocation suppliers provide edge storage services across hundreds or thousands of local-global locations.
Customers will move to cloud edge policies in the next three years so they can gain its benefits and stay more connected. Although the centralized cloud doesn't go anywhere, according to Miller-Jones, innovations in the models of serverless computing and the creation of distributed service layers across the cloud are fueling new real-time IT applications. Miller-Jones referred to two key ways that next year would change and extend cloud infrastructure on the network edge.
Developers will shift application servers and functions from the cloud into network edge locations through integrated growth and deployment pipelines. This would help develop systems that are more responsive and complex. In 2021, as companies adopt distributed application architectures, Miller-Jones also expects to see a greater focus on enterprise network edge protection and securing services, apps, users, and data.
Artificial Intelligence Engineering
As far as the cloud is concerned, AI is a crucial enabler of many aspects in which, we can expect technology to respond to our needs. As-a-service cloud-based platforms allow users to access machine learning features such as image recognition software, language analysis, and recommendation engines on just about any budget and with any degree of expertise. Cloud will continue to make it easier for businesses of all sizes and in all industries to more broadly implement these innovative toolsets, contributing to improved competitiveness and performance.
All areas of study where the implications of smarter algorithms distributed by cloud systems will be felt are autonomous vehicles, smart city networks, and pandemic response planning. In the logistics processes that keep cloud data centers up and going, machine learning also plays a major role. In these delicate and costly environments, cooling systems, hardware networks, and power users can all be tracked and controlled by AI algorithms to maximize running performance and minimize their environmental effects. Innovation and development in this area will likely begin to contribute to breakthroughs in the pace and performance of data centers.
According to Gartner, due to maintenance, scalability, and governance problems, AI projects are often not successful, but a good AI engineering strategy can help the efficiency, interpretability, scalability, and reliability of AI models while providing the full benefit of AI investments. Instead of a set of specialized projects, AI engineering enables AI a part of the standard DevOps process
Gartner said: "AI engineering is based on three core pillars: ModelOps, DataOps, and DevOps." DevOps primarily deals with improvements in high-speed programming, but AI projects are experiencing complex changes in code, models, and data, and all of them need to be modified. To benefit from AI engineering and MLOps, the company must incorporate DevOps concepts through the Machine Learning (ML) model pipeline and the DataOps data pipeline.
According to Gartner, responsible AI is evolving as an umbrella concept in terms of governance and AI engineering for some elements of AI implementations to deal with AI risk, transparency, trust, ethics, fairness, interpretability, accountability, protection, and compliance.
Offerings of Joint Cloud and Multi-Cloud Provider
Currently, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and so on, the major public cloud vendors, take more of a walled garden approach to the services they offer. And why not? Their business model has included marketing their services as a one-stop-shop, covering all the cloud, data, and computational needs of an enterprise. In reality, however, the market is gradually moving to hybrid or multi-cloud architectures, with architecture specifications allowing several models to be implemented.
When providers understand they can collaborate to drive go-to-market initiatives, build on shared strengths and "take on the 800-pound gorilla" that is AWS, according to Park, this year will see the beginnings of multi-platform and joint provider cloud offerings.
For most of the 2010s, this concept was anathema to cloud providers, as the goal of providing a cloud network was technically to be the only platform a business uses. An example of a partnership that could be extended to take advantage of Microsoft's ML capabilities and Oracle's networking is the Oracle-Microsoft interconnect relationship that began in June 2019, Young said.
Last year, rivals Microsoft and Oracle announced they were connecting their clouds to allow joint customers between Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud to migrate and run their business application workloads. The move was seen as an attempt to help contend against Redwood City, Calif., cloud underdog Oracle and AWS by Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft—the No. 2 cloud provider.
Automated Cloud Optimization and Orchestration
According to Park, cloud systems will continue to grow automatic cloud optimization and orchestration, as the difficulty of handling the quantity and performance of interconnected resources through apps and services overwhelms even the most knowledgeable of IT organizations.
Going Serverless
After micro-services architectures and service-oriented architecture, Serverless is the next evolution from the monolithic framework architecture, said Derek Swanson, chief technology officer of Needham, Mass.-based Silk, whose cloud data model makes hybrid cloud adoption for enterprises. According to the State of the Cloud study from Flexera 2020, Serverless was one of the five major fastest-growing PaaS cloud services for 2020.
Serverless is a real model of cloud computing, and it is difficult to overstate how much it can affect how much cloud is utilized in the future," Swanson said." "It is such a powerful pattern that applications are built and designed to work with serverless rather than serverless to work with the way applications are currently being developed."
The market is already on this path of containers and popular cloud-hosted applications as they accelerate the requirement for applications to be comprised of small pieces that, according to Swanson, can be given multiple treatments, like operating in different locations. For developers of all types, Serverless is a boon, he said. Moving ahead, this level of detailed information is mooted by serverless, with the cloud serverless interface being interaction with interface developers, not lower-level interfaces.
‘Ideal Storm’ of Cloud Migration and Data Privacy
According to the CEO and co-founder of Privacera, Balaji Ganesan, a data governance and security solution provider, and Apache Ranger’s co-founder, the combination of the coronavirus pandemic and a rise in cloud infrastructure would create the "perfect storm" for data governance and enforcement in 2021.
Projects to ensure safe data migration to the cloud will continue to be undertaken by companies, i.e. protection of all data needed by the corporate data governance team before their IT or data teams are authorized to migrate data from on-site to the cloud, Ganesan said.
This year will mark the end of what Ganesan calls the "wild west of information sharing." Regulatory laws around the world will shift towards strengthened monitoring of personally identifiable information (PII) data to protect user privacy, as countries are gradually following the pattern of the General Data Security Regulation of the European Union. The current facts for awareness-raising of coronavirus, alongside with the dissemination of individual data bot-assisted and manual and misinformation related to personal data leveraged from the sites of social networking such as Twitter and Facebook, marks the end of the wild west' of internet personal information and will change the face of data privacy. According to Ganesan, standalone data management and governance tools will eventually become an integrated component of mission-critical business activities.
When constructing new systems, developers and technical teams will incorporate these requirements early on. To provide safe access to data while maintaining ease of use and efficiency, IT teams can invest in tools. As a consequence, data protection, privacy and governance will become table stakes in all IT strategies.”
Games, like music and film, will be gradually delivered from the cloud
Most recently, Amazon entered the ranks of tech companies and startups selling their cloud gaming platform. Cloud gaming aims to revolutionize the way we experience entertainment services, just as with music and video distribution before it, by providing immediate access to massive game collections that can be accessed with a monthly fee. Microsoft, Google, and NVidia introduced services in 2020, while Sony has been available for many years. We know the new Xbox and PlayStation consoles usually cost us about $500. However, industry sources expect that coming-of-age cloud gaming would free us from paying hundreds of dollars on new devices every few years.
Increased challenges in cloud management and cost containment
Moving workloads to the cloud have significantly increased some operating efficiencies and collaboration for companies, but it has also been expensive.
We see that clients are always too inexperienced in their expertise and awareness and use their cloud resources in an unsustainable manner, relative to the way they use their conventional legacy networks," Swanson stated. Cloud waste is, in reality, a concern that hinders cloud adoption. Operational failures are far too high, and clients do not see the cost curves bent down, but stand at a ratio of 1:1. In addition to cloud waste, vendors of device systems and management want to be important to the rapidly growing demand for cloud computing, and they recognize that, according to Swanson, handling and running cloud computing is a modern operating model that needs new platforms and resources.
Suppliers are trying to make their products more effective by built-in cost and productivity management components of the cloud. Meanwhile, several new companies are aiming at cloud cost control and shaping these tools into the framework stacks of manufacturing.
The Growth of SASE Adoption
Derek Brost, director of professional services for security and compliance at InterVision believes secure access service edge (SASE) will achieve greater adoption. Companies are moving beyond the accelerated response steps they adopted this year for their significant and unprecedented rise in remote worker accessibility.
Mainly distributed as a cloud-based service pronounced as "sassy", SASE is a network system that incorporates software-defined WAN functionality with cloud-native network security services. It includes zero-trust network connectivity, secure online entryways, security brokers of cloud access, and firewalls as a service.
"Unfortunately, several IT networking groups discovered the burden and limitations of their remote access VPN concentrators. Even after resolving or fixing those breakpoints, they struggled to deal with emerging bandwidth restrictions, lack of network segmentation, a vulnerability in endpoint protection technologies, and countless untrusted machines connected to critical corporate networks," Brost said.
IT teams are troubling with their concentrators for remote access VPN as their sensitive corporate systems are connecting to untrusted devices regularly.
Working on Virtual Cloud Desktops
Our workstation's whole infrastructure is distributed to our laptop or desktop screen here, as a controlled cloud service where we work. This suggests that with the time staff spend working on computers, by-the-hour subscriptions will be applied, minimizing the burden of hardware upgrades and the need to dispose of obsolete technology.
This paradigm of computing is also known as desktop-as-a-service and is provided by Amazon through the Workspaces platform and Microsoft with Windows Virtual Desktop. Google also provides the same features in its Chromebook devices. It will result in boosting the workforce efficiency, ensuring employees use up-to-date and synchronized equipment. It also benefits protection as it is possible to handle all machines in a centralized manner, rather than ensuring that everyone on the network follows best practices. When people enter or leave a company, as the amount of hours spent on the platform rises or decreases, costs simply increase. This versatile feature means that virtual desktop services are likely to become more and more popular in the coming years
Cloud computing is only one of 25 developments in technology that I think will change our world over the years to come. If anyone wants to become a pro in cloud computing, he or she must obtain any valuable certifications available in the industry. Cloud Computing Bootcamp is very helpful for understanding and awareness.
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