Awareness of current trends in cloud technology is the first step toward making impactful decisions about spending your IT budget. A quick look at how one company spends its IT investment reveals how complex the process can be.
A prediction by Gartner analysts1 shows that cloud computing expenses will increase from $396 billion in 2021 to reach $482 billion in 2022.
As cloud computing continues to advance fast, paying close attention to emerging trends will help you guarantee that the money you designate for IT is used properly and effectively, and that your organization remains competitive. Having a clear strategic vision for which aspects of cloud technology are most important for your business will help you make better use of your limited resources: if you know what kind of apps and services are likely to be important down the road, rather than locking yourself into an expensive commitment with a particular provider or specific piece of equipment too soon, you will be better able to adapt faster when conditions change suddenly because they always do!
Improving the end-user experience with better performance, security, and usability constantly
According to a research by Salesforce2, user experience is a top priority for cloud computing in 2022. This factor will be a challenge as users demand more from their applications and services. IT leaders must focus on measuring user satisfaction and constantly improving performance, security, and usability to achieve this goal. The best practices to achieve this are:
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Measure current experience using tools like the Net Promoter Score (NPS) or other surveys
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Continuously strive to improve the user experience through features and capabilities of new software.
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Ensure that new features do not decrease user experience.
Achieving better efficiency with automation and AI
The cloud computing trends in 2022 will focus on automation, which promises to simplify technology management, increase business agility and accelerate innovation. AI-driven automation has made its way into many operational areas like maintenance, security, infrastructure management, decision making, and management tasks. It can be used to create or decommission virtual machines automatically, and perform routine backup activities and identify anomalies in network traffic flow that could indicate an attack.
Creating a more agile infrastructure with containers and serverless computing
Containers and serverless computing are growing in popularity among organizations that want to build and deploy very large-scale distributed systems, partly because they allow more agile infrastructure. Containers can help make it easier to manage your software development pipeline, where code changes flow incrementally through testing environments and ultimately into production. Serverless computing allows developers to focus on their code instead of the underlying infrastructure.
The use of containers for stateful applications will increase, with persistent storage taking advantage of container orchestration technologies such as Kubernetes.
Improving operational control using superior visibility of data
Take advantage of AI and machine learning to get better visibility into the data you are storing—and ensure that everyone in your organization has access to this information. Creating a data governance office for everyone at your company is on the same page about using data, analyzing, and sharing it internally. Plan securing your data from both inside threats (such as employees with malicious intent), and outside threats such as hackers who want to steal information or use it for their purposes.
Adopt cloud-native service management
From billing systems to booking tickets, IT services are going through significant transformations, driven mainly by AI. For instance, in your journey to cloud-native service management, you might leverage AI and machine learning capabilities for digital assistants, chatbots, or intelligent automation. These technologies help improve customer experience by providing faster resolutions and boosting employee productivity.
It is all about the data: Data is one of the most critical factors that drive innovation in this space. It allows companies like yours to get closer to their customers and understand them better than ever before, resulting in improved products, services, and better end-user experiences.
Use new Infra as Code technologies to simplify and speed infrastructure deployment
As your organization moves more workloads to cloud hosting, you will need to automate the infrastructure processes and integrate them with existing CI/CD pipelines.
Because of outsourcing, your DevOps teams will most likely not influence over where your resources are hosted. Infrastructure as code tools is not only for public and private clouds. Your IT team can use these tools to manage their own data centers and network infrastructure or integrate with multicloud environments.
These tools can run scripts on bare-metal servers, provision virtual machines (VMs), containers, or serverless functions on multiple platforms, and handle configurations for network devices such as routers and switches.
Accelerate DevOps with CI/CD transformations
What is CI/CD?
CI/CD stands for continuous integration and continuous delivery. The first, continuous integration means merging your team's code frequently into a shared repository. Continuous delivery is the automation of software releases. A pipeline that builds code commits and then tests and deploys them to production qualifies as CI/CD.
What are the advantages of CI/CD?
The idea behind CI/CD is to avoid bottlenecks in deployment pipelines so organizations can release working software faster and more often. One study reports that teams using CI/CD practices deploy 200 times more frequently than those who do not use these processes, with lead times averaging around two hours or less per deployment. In addition, automated testing at multiple stages can reduce the number of bugs found in production compared with manual testing methods on completed features or releases. The net result? Faster feedback cycles so developers can determine whether their code works as expected or if they need to make changes quickly while getting new features and fixes out to customers sooner instead of later. This practice also helps organizations deliver value faster by reducing firefighting efforts. When problems arise--because they will--it allows product managers to refocus their time on solving customer problems without worrying about technical issues slowing down progress toward new features or functionality.
Using open source in the cloud to harness innovation at a minimal cost
When it comes to open-source, we are not talking about unproven technology. Originally free and publicly accessible source code created by a community of volunteer programmers, the model has been widely deployed in many environments for more than 25 years. Open source is now the dominant model for software development everywhere and has worked its way into cloud computing.
One of your most important goals as an IT leader is to ensure that your applications, data, and services are always available. While public cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure are reliable in their own right, managing hybrid cloud environments can be difficult because of the need for consistency across multiple clouds.
That is where a cloud management platform comes into play. A unified cloud management platform like VMware vRealize Suite can help you manage your hybrid cloud environment by providing the operational tools you need to hand off control to developers while maintaining governance and security standards across your organization.
With a cloud management platform, you can specify a set of parameters that define which workloads should run in which environment, based on cost metrics and other factors like availability zones or regions, then let the software orchestrate everything automatically according to those rules. No more manual provisioning or troubleshooting is required!
Delivering consistent and secure operations across multiple clouds
There are three main types of cloud computing services. IaaS allows users to rent computing power from providers such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. PaaS provides development platforms for software applications hosted on those same providers' networks; SaaS offers programs over the internet without downloads or installations onto individual devices.
A survey by A10 networks3 that was undertaken by 127 technology companies, only 9% were satisfied by their security measures and they were looking forward to improving on that drastically.
Public cloud computing is the clear leader
Public cloud computing is the clear leader. The technology is well-established, and the big cloud providers are pushing hard to capture market share by offering new features and services. Cloud security remains a top priority. As more companies adopt public cloud services, they need to ensure that their data is protected from malicious actors (both inside and outside) who may try to access sensitive information.
5G takes off, but edge computing expands rapidly as well. 5G will be rolled out slowly across most regions during 2022-23; however, edge computing has already gained momentum as businesses look for an alternative to connecting remote locations via expensive fiber optic cables or satellite connections that can be spotty at times when it rains or snows heavily where you live in Canada (I'm looking at you). Edge computing allows businesses to take advantage of existing networks rather than upgrading them from scratch so they need less upfront capital expenditure (capex) upfront costs while also reducing latency issues associated with long distances between servers located near each other versus those located far away from each other within one city block depending on how many floors up your office building sits above street level which could cause problems if employees go downstairs instead of elevators due electricity going out due bad weather conditions like snowstorms - only kidding about this last one!
