The unprecedented changes that happened with the COVID-19 pandemic last year necessitated massive IT restructuring for organizations, irrespective of their size or industry. Most of them transferred workloads to the cloud and embraced hybrid and public cloud models to maintain business continuity.
For many organizations, this business transformation was in the wings, but COVID-19 accelerated the rate with which the plans were put to actions. Meanwhile, cloud providers around the world benefited from this – they brought innovation in their processes and generated more revenue.
With the pandemic still continuing, here are our top 10 cloud computing predictions for the year 2021.
Top cloud computing predictions
1. There will be more advancements in hybrid cloud.
Companies have already started decentralizing their IT operations to hybrid cloud environments, and we expect that this will continue in the coming years. According to the Flexera 2021 State of the Cloud report, majority of enterprises, 82 percent, are taking a hybrid approach to their cloud computing strategy.
In 2021, multi-cloud and hybrid clouds will flourish. There will be huge advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) hardware used to develop AI models. The edge computing will be paired with 5G advances that will provide modern computing in a more deterministic manner. This will translate to secure data management for the companies with the ability to monitor multiple distributed deployments.
2. Enterprises will embrace multi-cloud strategies to avoid vendor lock-in.
In the recent years, public clouds’ growing adoption has influenced traditional computing companies to fix their strategic focus on multi-clouds. In 2021, expect to see more companies seeking out multi-cloud tools to avoid their risk of vendor lock-in in cloud computing.
As per a report by Flexera (State of the Cloud Report, 2021), more than 90 percent of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy to become more future-ready.
Enhancements in multi-cloud offerings will compel the enterprises to increase their spending with these cloud providers. However, to fully embrace multi-cloud environments, organizations need to include automation in their strategy.
[Also Read: Top 8 trends shaping up digital transformation in 2021]
3. Low code, no code architectures will trend in cloud computing.
Another cloud computing prediction is the development of low code application architectures.
The coronavirus pandemic disrupted the operations to a great extent. Because of the widening IT skills gap, many companies moved to low code solutions to quickly respond to dynamic needs. Low-code solutions offered quick response to the new business environment and operations forced by the pandemic.
Now, as we are aware of the reactive shift in the working environment, most of the companies are still looking for low to no code architectures chosen during the crisis. In 2021 and beyond, we expect to see tools and solutions’ remodelling, AI & ML integration, and more low code, no code solutions in the market.
4. More businesses will turn to SaaS Business Intelligence (BI) apps.
Gartner expects that user spending on Software as a Service (SaaS) Business Intelligence (BI) applications will rise by 23.3% between 2017 and 2022. The use of BI applications is booming in cloud computing and will continue to rise as the cloud is increasingly being adopted.
With BI embedded SaaS applications, companies can perform rich data visualization and discover critical data insights.
5. Public cloud will become more dominant.
In the past year, public cloud helped some organizations to maintain business continuity and helped some to achieve faster growth during the pandemic. Gartner predicts the worldwide spending on public cloud infrastructure will grow 18% in 2021 reaching $304.9 billion.
“The ability to use on-demand, scalable cloud models to achieve cost efficiency and business continuity is providing the impetus for organizations to rapidly accelerate their digital business transformation plans. The increased use of public cloud services has reinforced cloud adoption to be the ‘new normal,’ now more than ever,” said Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner.
In 2021, the leading public cloud platforms will dominate the cloud computing market and expand into many areas of the global economy.
6. Cloud providers will build their future roadmap with AI engineering strategy.
Cloud computing market’s technology innovations now include AI engineering strategy to generate new opportunities in the sector. Forward planning will provide the best results from AI engineering, such as better performance, scalability, and reliability.
Therefore, many companies are looking for solutions that are built with AI for ensuring a strong core infrastructure.
“AI engineering offers a pathway, making AI a part of the mainstream DevOps process rather than a set of specialized and isolated projects. It brings together various disciplines to tame the AI hype while providing a clearer path to value when operationalizing the combination of multiple AI techniques,” says Gartner.
[Also Read: Top 10 predictions for AI in 2021]
7. Cloud-native applications will drive container adoption.
The pandemic has dramatically accelerated the consumption of container-based applications in cloud computing. The containers are making the headlines in the market today and are helping companies in accelerating the move – from the data center to the cloud to the edge.
By using containers, organizations can improve their cloud computing applications’ performance and scalability and easily move these applications to different clouds to achieve their digital transformation initiatives faster.
In 2020, there was a lot of hype around rootless containers – which allowed users to build, run, and manage them without admin rights. The best part about them is that they provide better security and do not require a daemon to create and maintain containers. This evolution of containers will continue in 2021 as well.
8. Kubernetes tools will become more mature.
Kubernetes has already been widely adopted in organizations. As the technology improves, we are expecting to see more innovations around it in the cloud computing industry.
In 2021, we will see more automation around Kubernetes’ tools, particularly around the deployment and lifecycle management process. The main reason for this trend would be to simplify Kubernetes technology for DevOps teams, where there will be more automation of the work to improve its quality and keep DevOps focused on what they are best at.
There will be evolution of CI/CD tools around Kubernetes, and this will help enable greater automation around Kubernetes deployments.
9. Enterprises will use augmented reality (AR) to train employees for cloud transformation.
In 2021, the companies will be bridging their technical skills gap by educating employees about cloud services by using different tools, including AR.
During the pandemic, as enterprises spent more to enhance their cloud management processes, we expect they will implement a wide range of augmented reality tools in 2021 to provide training to the cloud technical staff, working from home. For example, some augmented reality tools could display instructions for complex assemblies.
[Also Read: Augmented reality trends for 2021]
10. Security is going to be a big part of cloud.
In the years ahead, cloud providers will focus on building cloud solutions with high-security features.
According to recent enterprise research by S&P Global Market Intelligence, organizations increased their spending on security, when compared to March figures (from 15% to 28% of businesses). Businesses will continue to spend on security, and so in 2021, the demand for cloud products with security inbuilt features will continue to grow rapidly in the cloud computing market.
This growing demand for security capabilities is leading to the growth of the cloud security solutions’ market globally. Besides this, several advanced solutions such as AI-based breach detection, disaster recovery and technologies like anti-malware technologies, anti-ransomware technologies, will influence the cloud security market.
[Also Read: Cybersecurity can protect your reputation: What you need to know]
Wrapping up
Taking a close look at the top cloud computing predictions and embracing them at the earliest will enable cloud providers to enhance their offerings and meet the customer needs that are changing by the day in ‘the new era’.
What are your predictions for the cloud computing industry? Let us know in the comments section.
Cloud computing has made remote work a manageable task in times of uncertainty, as this is the first time that almost every business had to operate the work from home.