By 2025, the volume of data stored in the cloud will reach 100 zettabytes – and half will reside in the cloud. Jake Lindquist, Product Marketing Manager at Ensono, comments, “After two volatile years and an uncertain future, enterprises will limit capital investments in traditional three-tier data centers. The shift to hybrid cloud environments has been occurring for many years, but flexibility and adaptability are required for survival and not just innovation.”
He adds that private cloud has also become an essential part of business’ cloud strategies. “The options to build independently or outsource to service providers make it more attainable and appealing. Enterprises will continue to see value in utilizing private cloud for at least the next decade.”
As companies continue their migration away from on-premises data centers, the following industry experts have identified cloud trends — and challenges — stacking up for 2022.
Look for These Cloud Trends and Challenges This Year
Joe Scioscia, VP of Sales at VAI:
“One of the biggest challenges cloud providers face in 2022 is the rapid transformation of the digital sector. Everyone wants to be in on the action, but the methods for which organizations can transition to cloud aren’t one size fits all. The cloud market will need to become even more flexible in the years ahead. This includes taking holistic approaches to security and data storage, offering real-time security monitoring, analytics and more to help businesses get the most from the cloud. This becomes even more important when considering that remote work isn’t just a pandemic coping mechanism — it’s here to stay, and it isn’t going anywhere.”
Dan Lawyer, Chief Product Officer at Lucid:
“In the first six months of 2021, cloud app adoption increased 22 percent, with the average company using 805 distinct apps and cloud services — 97 percent of which were unmanaged. As cloud adoption increases and the cloud becomes more complex in 2022, tools to help developers understand and organize their cloud environment will become necessary and take over the market. Visual solutions that help them see their cloud infrastructures, detect and troubleshoot outages, and make changes in real-time will emerge as a better way to tame the cloud chaos — and make cloud management via spreadsheets obsolete.”
Marco Palladino, CTO and Co-Founder, Kong Inc.:
“Large, tech-savvy organizations are becoming much more judicious in how they use the cloud and will increasingly repatriate from their ‘all in cloud’ stance. We’ll start to see this shift happening in 2022. In much the same way that enterprises have embraced open source software and have opted to do it themselves, tech-savvy companies are beginning to realize they can run their own private cloud better and just use the public cloud for specific use cases such as usage bursts. Bank of America is one significant example of how a company can use private cloud to lower its IT costs, and I expect more large organizations will explore similar private cloud uses.”
Duan van der Westhuizen, SVP Public Cloud at Ensono
“Enterprises will continue to embrace cloud-native architectures to accelerate digital initiatives. Serverless technologies like AWS Lambda and Azure Functions allow for rapid development in a pay-as-you-go model without the need to deploy separate cloud infrastructure. Incorporating these technologies into agile methodologies in 2022 will accelerate speed to market and improve developer effectiveness while removing complex and lengthy IT infrastructure decisions from app development cycles.”
Dustin Milberg, Field CTO Cloud Services, InterVision:
“For organizations to be successful in the cloud journey, they need to shift from an IT mindset to an engineering mindset. This does not mean swapping out people. Rather, it’s necessary to invest in existing resources by teaching the skills that are critical to leverage the cloud while balancing cost, quality, and security.”
“Over the last 18 months, employees have been forced to become more self-reliant to address their own end-user computing needs. Most employees are now digital natives and fairly self-sufficient, which reduces the burden for corporate IT staffing. The current trends point to organizations beginning to phase out corporate IT and leverage strategic solution providers for tactical tasks like service-desk, unified communications, infrastructure, cloud services, etc. In turn, they will use the cost and resource savings to re-tool and become engineering organizations, strategically aligned to the measurable business outcomes.”
Sean McDermott, founder and CEO of Windward Consulting Group:
“Cloud access brokers have been around for a while, but there will be a big rise in this area as SaaS platforms are more prevalent in large enterprises but present significant security challenges. This technology provides a level of connection between systems and the cloud and creates necessary access controls to protect critical data.”
The Bottom Line: Cloud is the Competitive Path
Overall, industry leaders see enterprises gaining an advantage with the cloud. Rajiv Kanaujia, VP Operations at CloudCheckr, summarizes, “When Tesla started to use Giga Press for building large casing (car bodies), it was breaking away from the traditional car-building approach. Now the same strategy is being adopted by half a dozen car companies.”
“On the same line, I believe that the battle between traditional IT and cloud-native or cloud-centric IT approaches will continue and will get more heated,” Kanaujia says. “The winners will be companies that moved to cloud-native or cloud-centric IT approaches before others, gaining competitive financial leverage. The leverage gained will be used to develop new products and offerings and grow the company.”
