Cloud computing was one of the hottest topics in the technology and business media throughout 2019. This is no surprise as the cloud sector has been growing rapidly for the last few years. Synergy Research Group recently reported a 37% overall growth year-over-year in public cloud. They also note that it has taken just two years for the public IaaS and PaaS markets to double in size and their forecast shows them doubling again within the next three years.
While steady growth was expected this year, a few trends of note stand out. When the experts look back at 2019, they will likely stress the following cloud computing trends shaped the year.
Rise of the Enterprise Cloud Manager
We recently did a study on ParkMyCloud users which showed that a growing proportion of company technical leads have cloud or the name of their cloud provider–such as AWS–in their job title. This indicates a growing degree of specialization for individuals who manage and architect cloud infrastructure. Whether called enterprise cloud manager, cloud architect or something similar, 2019 saw the rise of a specialized role to oversee and direct cloud operations.
Consolidated Multi-Cloud Views
As enterprises large and small continue to adopt and use more than one public cloud, we have seen a rapidly growing need for a consolidated multi-cloud view and ability to take actions across multiple clouds in 2019. Third-party tools that do this provide enterprises the ability to pick a single tool to orchestrate, manage, govern and optimize their hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Many customers also sight the need to simplify operations—native cloud provider tools are not always easy to use.
Multi-Cloud Arrives
Multi-cloud truly arrived in 2019 and will only grow in 2020. The majority of organizations now use multiple clouds. In fact, most studies suggest that more than 80% of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy. Reasons cited include the need to avoid vendor lock-in, the ability to leverage the best in class cloud services from each cloud provider and application efficiency choices.
More Automation
One of the biggest tech benefits to a DevOps approach is automating away the manual tasks that bog down operations and critical projects. Thus, the trend toward automation continued to expand in 2019.
More Abstraction
IT became more and more abstracted in 2019. This means container usage grew, along with models that allow developers to worry less and less about infrastructure (such as serverless and PaaS).
Containers Became Mainstream
Application containerization is more than just a new buzzword in cloud computing; it is changing the way in which resources are deployed into the cloud. More and more companies utilize container services such as Kubernetes and cloud native services such as EKS, AKS and GKS in 2019,
Business continued to move to the cloud in 2019 and the six trends described above showed that the sector is growing–sometimes in unpredictable ways. Next year will, no doubt, also contain some surprises. But the trend for expansion of the cloud and related services is unmistakable for the foreseeable future.
