Era of cloud computing grows bigger in 2017

Cloud computing is critical to the growth of a digital content business. The public cloud services market in India is projected to grow 38 percent in 2017 to total $1.81 billion, according to Gartner.

The peak growth will continue to be driven by Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) which is projected to grow at 49.2 percent in 2017, followed by 33 percent in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and 32.1 percent in Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). The tremendous increase of SaaS and PaaS are indicators that the migration of application and workloads from on-premises data centers to the cloud, as well as the development of cloud-ready and cloud-native applications, are actually fueling the growth in the cloud space.

“We see increased cloud growth in the infrastructure compute services space as adoption becomes increasingly mainstream,” said Sid Nag, the esteemed research director at Gartner. “This has been predicted for a while, and the momentum continues to sustain in 2017 eventually growing through 2020 as the market further matures.”

In January 2017, RightScale conducted its sixth annual state of the Cloud Survey of the latest cloud computing trends, with a focus on IaaS. We have seen several new themes emerging this year. These include a narrowing race among public cloud providers, a decrease in private cloud adoption, renewed focus among enterprises on optimising cloud costs and strong growth in Docker.

The survey considered cloud buyers and users, as opposed to cloud vendors. Their answers are believed to provide a comprehensive perspective on the state of the cloud today.

The survey asked 1,002 IT professionals about their adoption of cloud infrastructure and related technologies. Forty-eight percent of the respondents represented enterprises with more than 1,000 employees. The margin of error is 3.07 percent.

Cloud users are running applications in multiple cloud solutions

Companies that use public cloud are already running applications in an average of 1.8 public cloud solutions and experimenting with another 1.8 public cloud offerings.

• Cloud computing is projected to increase from $67 billion in 2015 to $162 billion in 2020 attaining a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19 percent
• Gartner predicts the worldwide public cloud services market will grow 18 percent in 2017 to $246.8 billion, up from $209.2 billion in 2016
• Seventy-four percent of technical chief financial officers (CFOs) say cloud computing will have the most measurable impact on their business in 2017

Cloud platforms are enabling new, complex business models and orchestrating more globally-based integration networks in 2017 than many analyst and advisory firms predicted. Also, combined with cloud services adoption is increasing in the mid-tier and small and medium businesses (SMB), leading researchers including Forrester are adjusting their forecasts upward. The best check of any forecast is revenue. Amazon’s latest quarterly results released two days ago show Amazon Web Services (AWS) attained 43 percent year-over-year growth, contributing 10 percent of consolidated revenue and 89 percent of consolidated operating income.

Officially gone mainstream

For years, we have been discussing how early adopters and smaller organisations have been reaping the rewards of cloud technology. Now, as we enter what some analysts are calling the second wave of cloud adoption, large-scale enterprise and “slow adopters” are driving a new era in cloud deployments.

Larger organisations have historically been hesitant to move their critical applications to cloud environments due to concerns over security, latency and connectivity. However, with continual innovation and development in these areas, CIOs have become increasingly comfortable hosting their mission-critical applications in the cloud.

What is driving larger organisations to the cloud

The answer, as always, is customers.

Large-scale enterprises are seeking to develop new efficiencies to serve their customers better. In a recent interview, Aptean Senior Director of Product Management Jeff Atkins commented how transitioning to the cloud will be essential to the survival of larger, more sophisticated organisations.

Larger enterprises are finally learning what early adopters have known for years. What the cloud delivers is the means to offload difficult tasks, responsibilities and risk. The renewed focus on core competencies is having a direct effect on their ability to better serve their customers, drive new revenue from cross-selling and add-on opportunities and develop solutions that meet their clients’ future needs.

If we take a closer look at the 2017 trend, cloud adoption rates and overall cloud readiness have matured significantly. By now companies have understood that most technology innovation is cloud-centric and they are rolling up their sleeves to lay down the right Cloud strategy that will help them pursue their digital goals.

Choosing a right cloud solution normally involves going through a steep learning curve in which many company stakeholders are directly involved. It is, however, a fairly complex process — making the execution of any changes easier said than done. In fact, for most companies this year has been a steep learning curve in figuring out how to incorporate new digital capabilities into an organisation’s core structure.