Cloud Trends 2019: Compliance, Security, and Hybrid Solutions

Global spending on cloud services and infrastructure is on the rise and is expected to reach $160 billion by the end of this year (a 23.2% increase from 2017). By 2021, that number is expected to rise to $277 billion.

According to IDC, the industries forecasted to spend the most on public cloud services this year are as follows:

• Discrete manufacturing ($19.7 billion)
• Professional services ($18.1 billion)
• Banking ($16.7 billion)
• Process manufacturing ($10 billion +)
• Retail industry ($10 billion +)

Organizations within the industries listed above are also expected to leverage cloud services to build third platform solutions like the Internet of Things and big data and analytics.

By leveraging this technology to enhance and optimize customer journeys, these businesses can also lower their operational expenses. This will provide an excellent opportunity to dominate the market (within their niche) in 2019 and beyond.

What else can we expect in the new year? Here are the top five cloud computing trends that you should look out for in 2019.

1. Quantum Computing Is Near

We have been talking about quantum computing for several years, but until recently, it didn’t feel like it was really going happen. In fact, as the race for cloud supremacy heats up, we’re getting pretty close to realizing the dream.

All the top tech giants are working around the clock to build the first quantum computer. If they achieve that, we will soon be solving complex medical issues, making better financial models, and even having human-like interactions with artificial intelligence.

Last November, we saw the world’s fastest publicly available quantum computing platform with IBM’s 20-qubit cloud computer. 2019 promises to deliver a whole lot more within the quantum computing space that can revolutionize cloud services and solutions.

2. Cloud Services and Solutions Will Grow

In the new year, you can expect a lot more enterprises offering a number of cloud services and solutions as a service, including: 

• Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

Experts at Bain & Company expect an explosion of cloud services in the near future. In fact, they predict subscription-based SaaS to grow by 18% CAGR by 2020.

According to KPMG, PaaS will grow from 32% in 2016 to 56% by the end of 2019. This will make it the fastest-growing segment within cloud platforms.

3. Security & Compliance Will Be Critical

More and more businesses are now migrating to the cloud, and it hasn’t gone unnoticed. Over the next 18 months, you can expect bad actors to try to breach the system.

As security around the cloud will be iterating and optimizing, there will be an opportunity here for hackers to breach the system and steal valuable databases or source codes to sell on the dark web.

Security will also continue to be a significant concern as a simple misconfiguration can have serious consequences. This is evidenced by a recent Amazon S3 bucket misconfiguration that left 48 million records containing personal information scraped from social media sites highly exposed.

If you’re in a highly regulated industry like healthcare or banking, the fallout from such an incident can have a massive impact on daily operations and your bottom line.

To ensure compliance, cloud security should be approached from many fronts. For example, enterprises will need to start using built-in controls like identity access management, network security groups, and gateway network firewalls with new computational models like containers and serverless computing.

As governments start recognizing the risk, cloud computing will become highly regulated. This year we saw the General Data Protection Regulation come into effect in Europe, but this is probably just the beginning.

4. Hybrid Cloud Solutions Will Be Omnipresent

If you have engaged in digital transformation, you’ll already know that it can be highly challenging to make a complete transition to the cloud. As a result, hybrid clouds have become an attractive solution to this problem.

In 2019, you can expect a lot more hybrid cloud solutions that will enable businesses to make the transition at their own pace. This will allow them to reduce risk, while accessing efficiency and scalability, cost-effectively.

5. Cloud Users Will Continue to Be the Weakest Link

Whether it’s AWS, Azure, or Oracle, leading cloud providers and their platforms have generally been safe. These clouds feature the best firewalls known to man while their data centers are protected like fortresses.

However, the human factor will continue to be the weakest link. As mentioned before, misconfigurations can happen, and this could lead to systems being down for hours or even days.

Whenever your systems are down, you can’t ensure business continuity, and that’s going to lead to significant losses and damage your brand reputation. Although there are a lot of tools to help negate human error, we can certainly expect to hear about more incidents in the new year.

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