With the new year, it is quite clear that cloud computing’s all-encompassing trend is not showing any signs of slowing down. With cloud computing’s growing usage, technological advancements, and expanding market, 2019 will showcase the true potential of quantum computing, digital transformation processes, and revolutionary automation services.

Growth

Whether it be Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), or Software as a Service (SaaS), businesses now have the simplicity and flexibility to support their current and future operations. Per Gartner, the world’s leading research and advisory company, “the worldwide public cloud services market is projected to grow 17.3 percent in 2019 to total $206.2 billion, up from $175.8 billion in 2018.” Furthermore, as predicted, the fastest-growing segment of the cloud market is cloud system infrastructure services, also known as IaaS; this market is forecasted to grow 27.6 percent in 2019, reaching $39.5 billion (Gartner, 2018). 2019’s growth in cloud computing is sure to create serious competition between providers, ushering in a new era of features, costs, coverages, and support systems.

Cloud Vs. Hardware

While cloud computing’s popularity is indeed growing, I believe that many companies’ hardware budgets will not change for some time. The percentage of IT budgets regarding hardware will rise this year, even with the implementation of cloud services. I believe desktop computers will still reign supreme in the workplace as well, mainly due to their durability and ease of upgrading. However, I think the next challenge in 2019 is proper cloud management. With hybrid and multi-cloud environments, many businesses offer dashboards to help navigate and operate each one, but no real, effective manner of combining them in a single easy-to-use operation; this will be very complicated as cloud providers typically do not use the same APIs.

Hybrid Clouds

Due to the incapability of public clouds serving as a one-size-fits-all solution, hybrid clouds will reign supreme. Hybrid clouds provide the strengths of public cloud computing with existing IT infrastructures by keeping data local and the processing of data in the cloud. The ability to mix and match resources provides a more significant amount of scalability and the ability to place specific applications on the best devices available. Local clouds offer higher compliance with security restrictions and performance requirements.

Hybrid clouds, which use a combination of local and public clouds, offer reduced deployment costs and promotes more natural workload migration; they also improve the security of their applications by using private clouds to control where their network geographically operates at, which helps data security and data custody issues. Then, data which is less sensitive can be processed through public clouds, freeing up memory and reducing the number of physical devices that are needed. Each model of cloud computing has its strengths and weaknesses, so a combination of more than one can ensure that the advantages of each model are benefited from.

Backup and (DR) Disaster Recovery

According to Spiceworks’ 2019 State of IT report, backup and DR solutions will have the highest allocated cloud budgets, coming in at a staggering 15% (Spiceworks, 2019). The increase in backup and DR’s projected budgets are due to the shared responsibility model that public cloud providers utilize; public cloud providers such as Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services are all responsible for the security and availability of the infrastructure, leaving customers in charge for compliance and data protection.

5G’s Strengths and Weaknesses

The combination of cloud technologies and 5G cellular can provide substantial increases in functionality, flexibility, and capacity, allowing carriers to offer competitive services that other providers cannot. However, cloud’s transition to 5G has several speed bumps in the road to success.

While 5G’s integration into cloud technologies can provide significantly more function and capacity to the IoT (Internet of Things), it will be quite expensive for a network to transform into a 5G system. Additionally, with the United States’ new net neutrality regulations, what would be the point of spending a fortune on a faster system if some networks deliberately slow speeds for competing networks?

Summary

2019 is well on its way to providing us with cloud computing’s emerging trends, new methods of operation, and above all, expanding its popularity to entirely new markets. I for one, am very excited to see how 5G cellular will impact cloud computing, as well as Big Cable’s 10G dreams; with the already massive success of cloud computing, the new speeds and capacities of these networks are sure to skyrocket cloud computing’s abilities to levels we have only dreamed.

Sources

Gartner. (12 Sep 2018). “Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Public Cloud Revenue to Grow 17.3 Percent in 2019.” Retrieved from https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2018-09-12

Steinberg, Michael. (5 June 2017). “Why the Hybrid Cloud Model is the Best of Both Worlds.” Retrieved from https://www.govloop.com/hybrid-cloud-model-best-worlds/.

Spiceworks. (2019). “2019 State of IT.” Retrieved from https://www.spiceworks.com/marketing/state-of-it.