According to Forrester, approx. 60% of North American businesses rely on public cloud platforms today, which is 5 times the percentage five years ago.  In the year 2018, the Cloud technology transformed from being some cheap storage option to a must-have business capability. In 2019, we can see this trend growing further strong with Cloud computing looking to be the only way to deliver quality software services, quickly and seamlessly.

Backing the findings of Forrester, IDC predicts that 60-70% of all IT Enterprises investment would be in cloud-based solutions by 2020. According to Gartner, approx. 80% of enterprises will migrate entirely away from on-premises data centers, leading them to shut down their traditional data center by 2025.

Adding to the fire, rapid innovations in Cloud Computing and Real-time Data Analytics are leading to the development of the Internet of Everything (IoE), which will provide organizations with greater insights into the association customers have with their products and services.

Let us analyze the top trends in 2019 that may lead to these future predictions.

1) The Cloud Solution Providers Are Stepping Back and Focusing on Hybrid Cloud Solutions

Hybrid Cloud is the middle ground for the enterprises who don’t want to move everything completely on a public cloud. It combines the advantages of public & private clouds by allowing applications and data to transfer back and forth between public and private clouds. For cloud solution providers, the ultimate revenue generation is from the sales of the public cloud. But it seems, the enterprises are not ready for the complete migration, as of now. Realizing this, even AWS has stepped back and is now focusing on providing hybrid cloud solutions to match with the offerings of Azure and Google.

2) IaaS & PaaS Maybe Preferred More than SaaS.

Though SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) will still grow in 2019, enterprises will focus more on IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-service) and PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service). The reason is that in SaaS, an enterprise is completely dependent on the service provider for services like data, middleware, OSes, virtualization, etc. While in IaaS, the organizations still have a decent amount of controls, while PaaS being used by the developers who only want to control the applications themselves. According to Gartner, IaaS is predicted to reach $72.4 billion worldwide by 2020. While PaaS is expected to grow from 32% in 2016 to 56% in 2019 (Source: KPMG).

3) Serverless Computing

Serverless computing allows developers to build and run applications without thinking about servers by eliminating infrastructure management tasks, like configuring the servers. The cloud service provider runs the server and dynamically manages the allocation of machine resources.

The organization is charged on the actual amount of resources consumed by an application, rather than on pre-purchased units i.e. the client doesn’t need to rent or buy servers beforehand. According to Gartner, by 2020, 20% of global enterprises will deploy Serverless computing technologies.

4) Quantum Computing

According to Forbes, the global quantum computing market will be worth $1.9 billion in 2023, increasing to $8.0 billion by 2027. In the simplest terms, Quantum computers use quantum bits or ‘qubits’ that can store much more value than classical computer bits, and use much lesser energy. This makes possible computing chemical formulas and medical analysis, that were not possible before. Google, IBM, and a group of start-ups are in the race to produce the first truly usable quantum computer and it can be a reality very soon.  

5) GDPR and A.I.

GDPR and A.I. are the two important terms always linked together with Cloud. Security has always been a concern with Cloud Solution. Though GDPR compliance may plug many security loopholes but its practical implementation is far from reality. According to Commvault, only 12% of the 177 global IT organizations understand how GDPR will affect their cloud services.

Cloud computing can help immensely in building an A.I. that can communicate like a human. By accessing so many servers globally that hold so much data, A.I. can learn to make decisions and things like holding a conversation. Furthermore, A.I. algorithm can smartly analyze the incoming data load and optimize the usage of cloud resources.

Conclusion

The year 2019 will be the year of cloud computing. It will grow strong as the foundation of future’s enterprise applications. It offers on-demand fulfilling software experiences that were not possible before. Because of the fierce competition, cloud spending will grow tremendously as enterprises will be compelled to adopt cloud tools and services rapidly.

More businesses and their leaders would acknowledge cloud technology for the benefits like ease of deployment, scalability, flexibility, and cost savings. With Quantum computing and Serverless offerings, developers would prefer cloud services to concentrate more on developing great apps rather than wasting time in configurations. However, security and compliance is still a question mark for many IT enterprises looking to implement cloud solutions.