As a form of technology that’s gained mass adoption, cloud computing is maturing into something that’s standardized across major providers and exhibits high degrees of compatibility among various offerings. To help you get a picture of the latest cloud developments and see what’s viable for your business, we’ve gathered some of the top trends that have emerged in the past 12 months:
#1 Firms are (finally) using the cloud for High Performance Computing
Companies that design and develop new products, implement proprietary data models, and run advanced simulations accomplish these things by using High Performance Computing (HPC). Because of their sensitive nature, these firms tend to keep HPC workloads in-house.
However, businesses have begun shifting such loads onto public clouds because:
- While doing HPC in-house requires capital-intensive data centers, HPC is only done occasionally, on an as-needed basis — making the hyper-scalable cloud perfect for it.
- Internal resources tend to become insufficient, forcing firms to turn to the cloud anyway.
- The cloud allows companies to hold off expanding and upgrading their data centers.
- Data security on public clouds has improved dramatically in recent years.
The multi-cloud is turning into the omni-cloud
The multi-cloud — a once-emergent cloud strategy — is now commonplace among enterprises. Thanks to more compatible cloud services allowing cross-platform alliances among providers and vendors, cloud customers can avoid lock-in and take advantage of as many highly differentiated services as they wish.
This development has led to the formation of the omni-cloud strategy, a scheme that lets cloud users choose whichever cloud they want whenever they want, with business requirements driving purchasing decisions more than cloud costs. This is because the operating locations of Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers are spread differently across the globe, and edge computing is on the rise.
With geolocation taken as context, cloud infrastructures can be set up and optimized differently from one department or division to the next, depending on what cloud resources are available to them in their respective locations.
Private clouds are taking back workloads
Because private cloud infrastructures are becoming more viable in terms of costs and efficiencies, workloads that have been offloaded to public clouds are being repatriated. That’s not to say that the rate in which workloads are being migrated to public clouds will slow down significantly.
Rather, depending on the cost, security, and performance benefits they want to realize, companies can more freely choose between implementing a public or private cloud infrastructure, or building their very own hybridized version.
Intelligence is being injected into all things SaaS
Upgrades are the norm in tech. With software-as-a-service (SaaS), analytics, business intelligence (BI), and IT Ops apps, tech upgrades’ most recent iterations have machine learning built into them. This particular extension of artificial intelligence (AI) enables features that are based on automation and insight gathering, the most well-known among them being smart chatbots and predictive analytics. While not everything intelligent is necessarily useful, users will be hard-pressed to find a SaaS that hasn’t smartened up yet.
SaaSOps is now a thing
The proliferation of SaaS as a viable mode for delivering services has created a niche market — one where SaaS providers require specialized services themselves. That is, SaaS providers need specialists to help them execute cloud migrations, manage software licenses and updates, and implement cloud security measures — all of which and more are collectively known as SaaS Operations or SaaSOps.
If most if not all of what we’ve shared with you sounded like gobbledygook, don’t worry about it — Simplified IT Consulting is here to make these trends digestible for you. Our cloud specialists will help you with SaaSOps and everything else cloud. We’re eager to hear from you, so contact us today!
