User Review
( votes)From serverless, SASE and AI engineering to joint cloud provider offerings, CRN looks at the cloud trends expected to loom large next year.
Cloud Computing 2021- Cloud computing, which underpinned the world’s economy, global supply chains and remote workforces during the coronavirus pandemic, will continue to be an essential target for organizations looking for increased scalability, business continuity and cost efficiency in 2021.
“The effects of COVID-19 will linger throughout 2021, as businesses will look to lay a foundation for increased agility,” said Dustin Milberg, field chief technology officer for cloud services at InterVision, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based IT service provider and AWS Premier Consulting Partner. “Cloud will take a key focus in this goal, given its benefits of improved accessibility, scalability and flexibility.”
But those companies who view cloud as a journey and not a destination will see more success, according to Milberg.
“This is because simply ‘getting to the cloud’ doesn’t automatically mean you’ll see improved performance and spending,” he said. “Instead, cloud is an iterative process of optimization and creating security by design to match your company’s goals, both now and in the long term.”
Enterprises’ technology needs have increased in complexity over the past year, as workplaces quickly became decentralized during the pandemic, with remote workers across the globe, noted Steve Miller-Jones, vice president of edge strategy and solution architecture at Limelight Networks, a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based content delivery network (CDN) service provider.
“At the same time, exciting new technologies are making it easier to instantly generate, process and analyze data for better business performance,” he said. “These operational demands are shifting how businesses leverage cloud computing.”
Here’s a look at some of the cloud computing trends expected to loom large in 2021.
Global Public Cloud Infrastructure Market Hits $120B
The global public cloud infrastructure market will grow 35 percent to $120 billion in 2021, as the cloud continues to “take center stage” in the recovery from the pandemic, according to Forrester Research.
“The aggressive move to cloud, already proceeding at a healthy clip before the pandemic, will spike in 2021, yielding even greater enterprise adoption, cloud provider revenue and business value,” the Cambridge, Mass.-based market research company said in its “Predictions 2021” report.
Forrester previously forecast the public cloud infrastructure market would increase 28 percent to $113.1 billion next year.
The percentage of worldwide IT spending that’s dedicated to the cloud will continue to accelerate in 2021. Gartner, the Stamford, Conn.-based research and advisory firm, projects that worldwide public cloud spending by end-users will grow 18 percent next year to $304.9 billion, up from $257.5 billion this year.
“The pandemic validated cloud’s value proposition,” Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner, said in a report this week. “The ability to use on-demand, scalable cloud models to achieve cost efficiency and business continuity is providing the impetus for organizations to rapidly accelerate their digital business transformation plans. The increased use of public cloud services has reinforced cloud adoption to be the ‘new normal’ now more than ever.”
While software as a service (SaaS) still will be the largest market segment for end-user cloud IT spending – it’s expected to grow approximately 16 percent to $117.8 billion — application infrastructure services (PaaS) is expected to grow at a higher 26.6 percent rate to about $55.5 billion, according to Gartner. The growth in PaaS will be driven by remote workforces’ continued need to access to high-performing and scalable infrastructure via modernized and cloud-native applications, it said.
“The cloud is being used to facilitate much of our remote work environments, so companies will continue to migrate workloads and begin using more PaaS resources to take maximum financial advantage of these somewhat forced changes,” said George Burns III, senior consultant for cloud operations at SPR, a Chicago-based technology modernization firm.
