As we start our journey into 2019, we can expect to see the cloud industry expand across industries and move in a new direction, as companies move beyond standard adoption and redefine how they use cloud across lines of the business.
Looking ahead to these technological advances, enterprises will need to consider the impact of these changes and take on a new standard for adoption - the key to success will be to consider all foundational requirements and design goals at the beginning of the cloud journey to ensure the best possible chance for successful implementation.
We’ve reached an exciting time where we can finally welcome in a new era of cloud which will see sustained improvement in building solutions and the integrated data tools that best meet user needs. However, this comes with more competition, with recurring patterns and trends predicted to appear over this coming year.
Cloud 2.0 becomes Cloud 3.0
2019 will see in a new era of cloud, but what will this grown up Cloud 3.0 look like? Multi-cloud will become the most dominant approach as more organizations mature on their path to cloud from simply using platform services to deploying diverse clouds to meet their diverse needs.
It will continue to be used as a key strategy for organizations to pick and choose specific solutions to avoid dependence on a singular cloud provider. This also helps to mitigate the risk of a single point of failure and reduces impact and financial risk across the entire enterprise. In a time when security threats are at their greatest, the cloud industry will need to step up and leveraging two or more service providers will greatly decrease the risk of disaster during downtime.
Heterogeneous cloud will extend on premise
Today on-premises solutions, such as AWS Outposts and Azure Stack, allow organizations to run platform services that are in applications directly within their own data centers, as opposed to across providers. This shift coincides with the developments of microservices, which make applications easier to scale and faster to develop, helping to eliminate the cost of network and gravity of data issues.
By committing to local ownership of data, hardware and software, organizations have more control in the security of its data and the ability to customize systems. And this increased desirability for on-premise solutions will inevitably have an impact on heterogeneous cloud.
A ‘grey scale’ cloud world
With the public cloud now entering the data center through solutions like Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and AWS Outposts, the line between public and private cloud is slowly blurring. And the cloud world is evidently no longer black or white. As we enter this new ‘grey scale’ commoditized cloud world, adjustments will need to be made and APIs and control plans will become increasingly more important as we move full steam ahead.
As organizations migrate critical workloads to public cloud, the strategies of tomorrow will need focus more so on where streams are being run and who is managing them. With faster access to emerging technologies, on-demand capacity and unlimited scalability, 2019 will officially ring in the commoditization of the cloud.