Trends 2020: What is changing for cloud computing in coming year?

IT budgets are often the first to take a beating during instabilities and slowdowns. With the odds of another recession looming large, we would naturally expect IT budgets to freeze. But the actual numbers reveal a slightly different perspective this time. In its IT spending forecast for 2020 in India, the research firm Gartner revealed that, business spending on IT is expected to increase by a healthy 9% in 2020. This is against a growth of 6% in 2019, which re-iterates the fact that the Indian enterprises are pacing toward a highly positive year.

When we take a closer look at the IT spending patterns within organizations, it’s increasingly clear that a large chunk of it is directed towards cloud and automation technologies. More than 80% of the enterprise workloads are expected to shift to the cloud by end of 2020.

Adoption levels of the cloud have steadily increased over the years. But, does that mean that we will begin to see some sort of a cloud slump? Absolutely not! Cloud computing revenues are predicted to rise through the roof in 2020, as it becomes the indispensable component of almost all the technology and business initiatives that an organization embarks on.

While predictions are not always easy in the tech industry, here are some clear shifts that we see happening in the cloud space in 2020:

Cloud security back in spotlight
Securing data in the public cloud will be a key focus area in 2020, primarily because 2019 witnessed some major public cloud breaches. Cloud security discussions, to a large extent, have been limited to access controls and policy creations so far. As enterprises migrate more critical workloads to public cloud environments, aspects like cloud workload security, data encryption and threat intelligence will take centre stage. Shared responsibility models and privileged access management will further raise the bar for cloud security.

Cloud to edge, and back
Edges are getting more and more intelligent, as users look for real-time access to data in the IoT era. Edge computing is more distributed in nature, with information processing happening at the ‘edge’ where the data is generated or consumed. Technically, edges are the opposite of cloud---which is all about centralized processing. In the coming days, as edge computing moves to mainstream, we will see it complementing cloud technologies for seamless back and forth of data. In fact, a robust cloud infrastructure will emerge as the basic necessity for any edge computing project.

True era of hybrid cloud
Irrespective of how lucrative the public cloud stands to be, on-premise data centers are not going away anytime soon. In fact, close to 50 percent of Indian enterprises is predicted to adopt a hybrid cloud model in 2020, which is a quantum leap from where it stood a year ago. The lack of a truly consistent hybrid experience was probably one of the biggest barriers for hybrid cloud adoption so far.

With new innovations happening in the market, hybrid clouds can provide a genuinely seamless experience to organizations and solve critical challenges around latency. Customers will be able to have a ‘cloud-like’ experience across their environments—and not really look at their public cloud and on-premise infrastructure as two different pieces.

AI/ML will redefine cloud
Artificial intelligence and machine learning will continue to be critical areas of focus for organizations across industries. What will change though is the way organizations approach these technologies. While AI and ML are driving a lot of investment, most projects still remain fragmented and distributed. In 2020, organizations will focus largely on centralizing these initiatives onto a more robust platform and cloud will emerge as the de facto standard. A recent survey highlights that about 67% of IT professionals believe that AI/ML will be the primary catalysts for cloud adoption in 2020.

Serverless takes the lead
Serverless computing has been around for some time now, with the introduction of AWS Lambda computing platform in 2014. The biggest advantage of serverless is that it enables developers to focus on their core product instead of worrying about managing and operating servers, either in the cloud or on-premises. Gartner predicts that more than 20 percent of global enterprises will have adopted serverless computing technologies in 2020, a sharp increase from the 5 percent in 2018. Paul Johnston, the co-founder of ServerlessDays, aptly calls it “the next iteration of cloud”.

-- -- Amit Gupta, Co-founder and CEO, Rapyder Cloud Solutions.