The Future of Cloud Computing

The Future of Cloud Computing in 2019

Cloud adoption has seen a significant increase over the last few years and recent reports from Gartner suggest that we will see a 50 per cent investment in cloud technology over the next four years. The cloud is obviously here to stay but many companies are currently rushing to migrate to the cloud because they believe it goes hand-in-hand with innovation.

How can businesses make the most of their current compute resources?

Businesses need to take a measured approach, looking at all available options to assess where the workloads really belong, based on business need, existing IT infrastructure, cost and security considerations, etc. They also should fully explore and determine the compute resource potential in existing desktops and servers in the organization’s current IT infrastructure. This can be recaptured and made available for running workloads at little to no incremental cost. We know that PC and CPU capacity is typically 80 percent available, 80 percent of the time, resulting in significant untapped compute resources for most organizations.

Cost savings associated with leveraging unused on-premise compute capacity comes not only from now being able to keep workloads on-premise in the first place but also from being able to repatriate existing workloads out of the cloud and back in-house.

Cloud adoption has seen a significant increase over the last few years and recent reports from Gartner suggest that we will see a 50 per cent investment in cloud technology over the next four years. The cloud is obviously here to stay but many companies are currently rushing to migrate to the cloud because they believe it goes hand-in-hand with innovation.

How can businesses make the most of their current compute resources?

Businesses need to take a measured approach, looking at all available options to assess where the workloads really belong, based on business need, existing IT infrastructure, cost and security considerations, etc. They also should fully explore and determine the compute resource potential in existing desktops and servers in the organization’s current IT infrastructure. This can be recaptured and made available for running workloads at little to no incremental cost. We know that PC and CPU capacity is typically 80 percent available, 80 percent of the time, resulting in significant untapped compute resources for most organizations.

Cost savings associated with leveraging unused on-premise compute capacity comes not only from now being able to keep workloads on-premise in the first place but also from being able to repatriate existing workloads out of the cloud and back in-house.

Is cloud computing really the future for all industries or are there businesses that would be better off keeping their systems on-premise?

We believe in a future that benefits from both on-premise and cloud resources. There is a need for both and different industries—and certainly different organizations—will have distinct needs and considerations influencing the degree to which these options are tapped. The conversation should be about optimal workload placement across ALL resources.Most companies will benefit from a combination of cloud and private infrastructure—mixed ecosystems that offer cost efficiencies and requisite security controls, along with optimizing compute capacity and existing IT investments.

Do you think there will be an increase in cloud consultancies to help address organizations’ growing cloud expenditures?

How will the IT sector go about closing its talent gap?

Over the course of the last decade, there has been a significant pendulum shift in the IT talent pool, driven by-and-large by the emergence of the cloud. It used to be that the IT profession put a premium on skilled workers who could build datacenters (e.g., infrastructure engineers). But now, it’s more about those who know how to configure cloud services. This has created a talent gap, and the industry is still trying to catch itself up. In the meantime, consultancies and DevOps engineers are helping to fill the void, and some of the larger cloud players are penetrating university curriculum to try to get ahead of the incoming classes of workers, encouraging them to become software engineers. 

From my POV, though, none of these is a long-term solution. Instead, we need to focus on fostering growth amongst computer scientists. They are educated, committed to their discipline and cloud agnostic—making them even more marketable. Computer scientists and other technology purists are the answer to sustaining job growth in IT now and in the future. However, we must not lose sight of the need for platforms that ultimately overcome operational complexity, reduce the learning curve, and allow non-IT users to run their workloads without needing IT skills themselve

Many businesses have begun to appoint CIOs as their systems become increasingly complex. Do you believe this role is here to stay?

In its traditional role, no. The role of the CIO was developed as a way to bridge technical and non-technical worlds. But the fact is, today’s corporate leaders are smarter, more educated and have stronger technical acumen than ever before. The role of the CIO has morphed into something that more closely resembles the CTO. The c-suite of tomorrow will presumably be more focused on the CTO as business outcomes align more with technology. The only way the CIO sticks around is if it can differentiate its responsibilities from that of the CTO. An alternative is that the technical roles in the c-suite – CIOs, CTOs, etc. – may be overhauled altogether in favor of roles like chief data officer, or chief architect officer. In other words, as businesses continue to underscore the importance of data, new roles may emerge.

Source: https://www.techradar.com/news/the-future-of-cloud-computing-in-2019

10 Cloud Computing Predictions that will transform 2019.

#1. Enterprise cloud spending will increase

#2. Multi-cloud/hybrid-cloud

orchestration platforms will gain followers

#3. The democratization wave

# 4. Cloud services that suit everyone

# 5. Full-stack developers need to

understand data processing engines

#6. Adoption of cloud-based AI and ML functionality

#7. The appointment of Digital Skills Officers will rise

#8. Data processing engines like Spark to be in vogue for full-stack developers

#9. The drive to containerization

# 10. Legacy applications will be enhanced by the cloud

Source: https://www.analyticsinsight.net/10-cloud-computing-predictions-that-will-transform-2019/