We are now well into 2018 and increasingly a lot of enterprise business owners and IT executives are turning their attention to how they can use latest technology and innovations in the cloud computing industry to achieve their 2018 business objectives. We have compiled a list of 5 cloud computing trends that strategic business owners have to watch out for in the coming few months in 2018:
1. Exponential growth in cloud services solutions: In 2017, a lot more businesses and consumers experimented with Software as a Service (SaaS) to try cloud services. Innovations in platform and infrastructure as a service (PaaS and IaaS respectively) have expanded the range of cloud solutions offered to enterprises. In 2018, we can expect to see many more organizations take advantage of high-performance, scalability and simplicity that the cloud guarantees. According to a survey conducted by Cisco on cloud services, SaaS solutions will be the most highly deployed cloud service across the globe. Businesses that want to simplify operations and make it easier for their customers to access services will move more aggressively toward integrating SaaS, IaaS, and/or PaaS into their business processes.
2. Cloud Storage to grow exponentially: According to a forward looking survey from Cisco, cloud data storage is expected to grow nearly 4 fold from 2016 to 2021, growing from 663 EB in 2016 to 2.6 ZB by 2021. As more and more businesses produce data in the cloud at an exponential rate, there have to be ways to manage and monitor the data. After all, data is the new oil ! Products helping customers manage data and providing rich real time insights and analytics on data will be indispensable to an enterprise’s strategy to be ahead of its competition.
3. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning driving data management: According to a AI report from G2crowd, a lot more businesses are looking to automate their decision making capabilities, they will gravitate towards Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to gain the benefits. Cloud is no longer a place to offsite and store data. New trends in AI and ML have transformed cloud from a storage engine to a powerful computing brain. The algorithms already being developed in this field are making cloud capable of near-human capabilities like responding and talking (Alexa, Siri, Cortana) or comprehending your pictures (Google DeepMind, Google Photos). Enterprises will be leveraging machine learning to enhance their data protection and data analysis abilities. According to a report from Gartner, AI will be a major digital driver for businesses trying to enable the next wave of digital transformation for their organizations and products helping businesses achieve the same will be the ones to watch out for.
4. Ransomware and Security challenges within the cloud: 2017 was a year which witnessed a huge jump in ransomware and cyber security attacks all throughout the world. Attacks such as Wannacry Ransomware, Equifax data breach are just a few example of IT security threats that enterprises will face in the future. Cloud infrastructures will be targeted for security attacks, so admins and analysts need to be armed with products and tools that can continuously detect and remedy any threats to their cloud infra.
5. Compliance with new rules and regulations like GDPR: New data governance and compliance laws such as GDPR coming into effect starting from 2018 are bound to affect storage and data in the Cloud. This means that enterprises all over the world have to restructure their data management strategy. The GDPR regulations are designed to protect the identity of EU citizens and non-compliance with this can result in penalties upto 20 million Euros or 4% of their annual revenues. Businesses will be looking for solutions that help them with various features such global indexed search, advanced reporting and backing up their data. Technologies that would be offering these capabilities would be top of mind for many of the enterprise businesses.
These trends will determine how organizations and businesses all over the world will enable digital transformation by using enterprise credible and reliable products that help them achieve scale and greater business profits. We at Actifio are equally excited to be a part of this transformation in the cloud computing industry in 2018!
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