COVID has been the catalyst forcing engagement online

The Coronavirus pandemic has fundamentally changed human behavior. Technology has emerged as the biggest enabler in our personal and professional lives, and has redefined the future of how and where work gets done. As these ‘virtual workplaces’ gain momentum, it has resulted in enterprises frantically shifting towards cloud computing and other emerging technologies. In a post-COVID world, alongside cybersecurity, cloud computing will be an essential technology for businesses to continue to thrive. Hardly, any of us could foresee that Work from Home would become the new mandate. We couldn’t predict that technology will emerge as the biggest enabler by not only simplifying our personal but also professional lives. Redefining the future of how and where work gets done through “Virtual Workplace” has meant that enterprises are frantically shifting towards cloud computing and other emerging technologies.

As a result, the cloud has taken the center stage. According to IDC, 64% of India’s organizations are expected to increase demand for cloud computing, and 56% for cloud software to support the new normal. Further, as per a recent report by Deloitte, cloud computing will be a highly relevant technology in the “next normal. Going forward, hybrid cloud offers greater flexibility to organizations as it combines the advantages of private and public clouds. It offers the best of both worlds. Hybrid cloud enables organizations to enjoy enhanced scalability, speed, and agility of the public cloud while maintaining strict security and privacy guidelines offered by private cloud.

In the near future, more organizations will adopt a hybrid cloud approach as they’ll have no other option but to optimize their cloud infrastructure to maximize returns.

As per Gartner, SaaS applications are expected to generate the highest-ever revenue of 105 billion dollars this year. As enterprises are enabling remote working for most of its employees, SaaS based applications and tools have seen a great surge in demand. Even after employees return to office, SaaS will continue to grow because of the computing power and agility that it provides to enterprises. With continued innovation of SaaS services and offerings, and work from home becoming more mainstream, SaaS growth will remain strong. Secondly, as the enterprises are frantically moving their monolithic architecture to microservices, containers will continue to gain prominence. By containerizing workloads, organizations can make their applications much more nimble, giving them the flexibility to rapidly shift resources to new environments. Gartner predicts that by 2024, worldwide container management revenue will reach 944 million dollars. As the next normal approaches, adoption of containers will continue to rise as it enables enterprises to speed up implementations, choose platforms based on specific applications and optimize environments for success.

Many predict that, the businesses of the future will need distributed cloud infrastructure, applications, and databases to address modern workflows and their requirements. Distributed cloud computing has geographically dispersed infrastructure that primarily runs services at the network edge; hence it allows organizations to reduce latency, network congestion, and risk of data loss. Further, it allows users to keep sensitive data within specific regions through dispersed cloud data centers to ensure the intelligent placement of data, computing and storage. As per Gartner, by the year 2024 nearly all legacy applications that are migrated to public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) will require optimization to become more cost-effective. Cloud providers will continue to strengthen their native optimization capabilities to help organizations select the most cost-effective architecture that can deliver the required performance. The market for third-party cost optimization tools will also expand, particularly in multi-cloud environments.