Top 5 cloud computing trends: what to expect in 2018

Cloud computing continues to take an important role in business. Moreover, with a growing need for strong data storage capacities, many companies move all their data to the cloud. Having evolved from a personal cloud storage, now cloud computing offers a convenient way to store and retrieve large data volumes.

There are various reasons of why the cloud is so popular. Providing such benefits as reduced costs, remote access, improved IT support, management, and maintenance, cloud computing helps companies easier and faster achieve their business objectives.

Speaking of cloud computing predictions, get insight into the following pieces from different reports and surveys. The figures are impressive, aren’t they?

 

Cloud computing predictions

 

• According to Forrester, by 2020 public the cloud computing market, including cloud platforms, business services, and applications, will reach $236 billion.
• SiliconANGLE says that enterprise cloud spending will increase at a 16% CAGR 2016-2026 period.
• Bain & Company analysts expect the market revenue of Global Cloud IT will reach $390B by 2020
• At least 50% of IT spending will be cloud-based in 2018, reaching 60% of all IT infrastructure, IDC predicts. What’s more, the cloud is expected to become the best and most preferred delivery element for data analytics.

 

Cloud computing trends for 2018

 

1. The rise of cloud services solutions – SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS

With the rise of cloud computing, 2018 will see a rapid growth and evolution of cloud services solutions too. SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS offer many advantages and open various business capabilities.

PaaS, or a Platform-as-a-Service, provides a cloud platform enabling companies to easier build, deploy, and launch applications comparing to integrating and maintaining the own infrastructure. In the year to come, PaaS is expected to be the fastest-developing field here, increasing from 32% adoption in 2017 to 56% in 2020 (KPMG).

IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) offers virtualized computing resources and also provides such benefits as cost-efficiency, simple support, and maintenance. According to Statista, IaaS market will reach $17.5B next year.

In IaaS sector, Amazon takes a leading position with AWS (Amazon Web Services), leaving Google (Google Compute Engine) and Microsoft (Microsoft Azure) behind. Wikibon (a research firm) expects AWS revenue to grow to $43 billion by 2022.

At the moment, the situation is unlikely to change in the coming years. However, though Amazon is the first for today, Google and Microsoft create the strongest competition and strive for expanding their cloud infrastructure solutions.

2018 will be also about the growth of SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) solutions. According to Bain & Company projections, SaaS will grow at an 18% CAGR by 2020. In the coming years, the cloud market is expected to continue to be introduced by Google Apps, Salesforce, and Citrix GoToMeeting.

Since cloud services sector is a fast-growing industry, that enables companies to achieve a higher performance and reduce costs, in 2018 we expect to see many more organizations to adopt PaaS, IaaS, and SaaS solutions.

 

2. Cloud security challenges

Though 2017 hasn’t yet ended, it has already become the year with a very high number of cyber attacks. Equifax data breach, the CIA Vault 7 hack, and WannaCry ransomware have clearly shown the existing vulnerabilities.

For example, the data breach of Equifax credit reporting agency led to the exposure of millions of people’s names, social security, credit card, and driver’s license numbers, thus bringing significant harm and losses to the organization and its customers.

So, it’s not surprising, that despite many benefits of the cloud computing, many companies still doubt to move their data to the cloud because of security risks and challenges.

However, while cyber attacks are becoming more sophisticated, security IT specialists and analysts are also working on improving security solutions, that ensure an instant detection of suspicious activities and successful prevention of any types of cyber attacks.

As the entire world is concerned about cloud security challenges, the investment in developing and integrating strong countermeasures will increase. According to Gartner, the spending on cloud security will grow from $86.4 billion in 2017 to $93 billion in 2018. And IDC predicts, that by 2020 the global revenue for security solutions will reach $101.6 billion.

Thus, cloud security issues will be the major concern in 2018, meaning new innovative tools and technologies to come.

 

3. The Internet of Things

Today, the Internet of Things continues to take the center stage in the technology world. The number of IoT devices is rapidly increasing, with projections to reach almost 30 billion by 2020, most of them “working” with the cloud.

In IoT ecosystem, smart devices use the cloud for transmitting and communicating data. As the number of devices and data volumes are growing, to meet the demand the cloud use will be also growing.

In the year to come, we’ll also see important innovations in real-time data analytics and cloud computing, which will push the Internet of Things to further evolution.

 

4. Artificial Intelligence

At the moment, there is a big hype regarding machine learning and Artificial Intelligence, taking an important role in the development of innovative tech solutions and applying new business models. Today, they also find their application in the cloud.

Striving to support their leading positions, corporations like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and IBM have already mix Artificial Intelligence with the cloud and demonstrated AI-based cloud services.

For instance, Amazon became the first public cloud provider, connecting AI with the cloud. This great decision allowed the company to ensure a high-security level of their customer data.

 

5. Increased cloud storage capacities & Crowdsourced storage

Today, cloud solutions are an important part of business activities. In 2018, we’ll see a significant growth of data storage. Cloud service providers will bring more data centers online with increased cloud storage capacities.

Earlier Cisco predicted that in 2017 the total cloud storage capacity would become 600 EB worldwide. In 2018, it’s expected to reach 1.1 ZB. It means that we can expect organizations to take advantage of using the new additional space for storing and analyzing large data volumes.

It is especially good news for companies working with Big Data. Increased cloud storage capacities imply expanded capabilities for collecting and processing huge data sets for transforming raw data into valuable information.

There are many opportunities for business, from making deeper insights into customer data to improved analytics options.

What’s more, in the year to come data storages will become cheaper and more available. For instance, Amazon has already announced lower prices for AWS.

Another cloud computing trend is an increasing use of crowdsourced storage. This way become more popular for people, wishing to reduce costs and save all benefits from using the cloud. In 2018, we expect a growing popularity of this model, especially in such applications as DropBox.

Thus, in 2018 we’ll see rapid growth and evolution of cloud computing, with the rise of cloud services solutions, fight against cyber attacks, appearance of new models and AI-based cloud services.