The Growing Cloud Trend to Watch Out for in 2021

Digital technology in every enterprise needs to work smarter, not harder. Cloud computing has emerged as the biggest enabler for the world economy, businesses and remote workforces during the coronavirus pandemic, and will continue to be imperative for organizations looking for increased scalability, business continuity and cost efficiency in 2021. According to Gartner, the worldwide spending on public cloud will grow by 18.4% in 2021 to a total of 304.9 billion dollars, up from 257.5 billion dollars in 2020. The cloud’s ability to offer pay-per-use, scalable models to achieve cost efficiency and business continuity is providing an impetus for organizations to rapidly accelerate their cloud migration journey.

Further the Gartner report states that the proportion of IT spending that is shifting to cloud has increased in the aftermath of rapid adoption of the “work from home” model, with cloud projected to make up 14.2% of the total global enterprise IT spending market in 2024, up from 9.1% in 2020. Although software as a service (SaaS) remains the largest market segment and is predicted to grow to 117.7 billion dollars in 2021, while platform as a service (PaaS) is anticipated to grow by a higher margin at 26.6%. The increased consumption of PaaS is driven by the need to modernize the legacy applications and the underlying infrastructure to reduce latency, and achieve cost efficiency and better performance.

The cloud will continue to evolve and innovate. However, the potential benefits of cloud haven’t been utilized by all industries uniformly, as some industries have unique demands in terms of data localization, protection or compliance laws. For instance, the financial services industry is highly regulated and, therefore, requires a cloud partner that understands the nuances of security, compliance, edge computing, software-defined network functions, etc. Hence, major public cloud providers are recognizing this need and investing in “Industry-Cloud” solutions to meet specialized business requirements.

Leading cloud services providers are joining this bandwagon to provide highly polished and targeted features and support to different industries. However, not many are aware of its true potential across sectors. Here we take a look at the benefits of opting for industry clouds. By having several industry-specific features built-in as part of the cloud platform services, enterprises do not need to worry about the infrastructure management, platform modernization, and the associated regulatory, security, and compliance guidelines. These responsibilities naturally get transmitted to the cloud service provider. When cloud solutions have these capabilities built-in, it addresses the problems of systemic risks that most organisations face with security and data privacy. This allows businesses to focus on creating value differentiating offerings and products in a cloud-native environment.