COVID-19 has proven to be an important milestone in the adoption of cloud across enterprises, start-ups, SMBs, and even governments. Moving to the cloud enables faster time to market, on-demand scalability, and reduced total cost of ownership for technology infrastructure.
Cloud trends for 2022 and beyond
As more and more organizations are migrating to the cloud and preparing their cloud strategy, the following are the trends that are going to stay in 2022.
1. Hybrid & multicloud
Most of the organizations are today talking about “cloud-first strategy.” Any application or digital transformation use case that can be conceived in a public cloud should be planned on the cloud. Specifically, we see the “cloud-first” trend with start-ups more prevalent because of reduced investment in technology and on-demand scalability that the cloud can offer.
Related article: What is “the Cloud”? And what is it not?
However, we see a hybrid approach where organizations are keeping some core and critical business applications like ERP, mailing, customized applications with proprietary business logic, etc., in their own data center (on-prem) and move non-critical workloads/applications to the cloud (CRM, analytics, etc.).
Experts from VMware define the term with the following explanation. In a multi-cloud environment, an enterprise utilizes multiple public cloud services, most often from different cloud providers. For example, an organization might host its web front-end application or CRM on AWS and host its Exchange servers on Microsoft Azure.
Since all cloud providers have different services and their strengths and weaknesses, organizations adopt a multi-cloud strategy to deliver best of breed IT services, to prevent lock-in to a single cloud provider, or to take advantage of cloud arbitrage and choose providers for specific services based on which provider is offering the lowest price at that time.
2. Containerization
What other cloud trends can we spot? Globally over the last two decades, we have seen an increasing trend in the adoption of virtualization of physical IT infrastructure (compute, storage, and network). Physical to virtual (P2V) is the approach that has become very popular to optimize the cost of IT resources.
However, with the increasing demand to make applications ready for cloud (public or private), changing monolithic legacy applications to microservice-based architecture. Microservice-based applications are required to be containerized and are to be managed through an orchestration platform.
A Gartner news report states that containers have become popular because they provide a powerful tool for addressing several critical concerns of application developers, including the need for faster delivery, agility, portability, modernization, and life cycle management. By 2022, Gartner estimates more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production, up from less than 30% today.
3. Edge computing
Today we see everything around us getting connected to the cloud, and we are fetching data (structured and unstructured) from machines, people, assets, plants, cars, appliances, etc., through wearables, RFID tags, cameras, sensors, and satellite images. This massive data has to be processed to get some meaningful insight. This is where edge computing can help you manage the load distribution.
At times, it is not possible to transmit this massive data from thousands of devices to the on-prem data centers and cloud for processing with the desired latency. It’s important to build data storage and processing capabilities on the edge itself. With the advent of technologies like IoT, analytics, and 5G, we can build edge computing capabilities where the data is processed and analyzed right at the location, and required insight is being provided.
Related story: The Facts About Virtual Data Centers
The classic example of edge computing can be enabling use cases like automated/connected cars, adaptive traffic control systems, and content delivery at the edge for faster video streaming.
4. Cost optimization
When embracing your cloud journey, it’s important to keep a close watch on your monthly bills to try and optimize your costs across the cloud services you’re using and plan to use.
There are two ways you can do cost optimization on the cloud:
- Scheduling- you need to understand at what time how much IT resources are being consumed, and accordingly schedule / divert IT resources.
- Size of the resources- it is important to keep track of how much compute, memory, and storage per virtual machine is being consumed by your application and accordingly keep on re-sizing your resources.
There are some tools and platforms available which give you visibility and control across your multi-cloud environment for you to be able to do continuous cost optimization. Besides, if you’re a fast-growing business in the process of expanding your seller operations online, then cost optimization also entails other aspects such as marketing costs.
5. Cloud security and environment
It is a shared responsibility to protect data on the cloud and on-prem between organizations and cloud service providers. All major Hyperscalers (AWS, Azure, and Google) offer data encryption (source and inflight) as a part of their managed services.
Also interesting: The Best Locations for Data Centers [Infographic]
Organizations must plan for a very robust data protection policy to make sure there are enough copies of data available in case of any cyberattacks. Thinking about data security, resilience and risk management will often involve backup and disaster recovery strategies.
This is not only relevant if you’d like to get an ISO/IEC 27001 certificate for information security. Beyond that, it lets the CIO sleep at night. This should be a strategic solution as well, and in case you’re looking for a VMware backup or Hyper-V backup solution, you should have a look at Vinchin Backup ＆ Recovery as a starting point.
Be it on-prem or on a cloud, you have to consider factors like power consumption to run the IT resources, the cooling requirement for the environmental impact. Many Hyperscalers and large-scale data centers are powering up their data centers with renewable energy.
Conclusion
The adoption of the cloud (private and public) is not just a trend. It is going to stay, and with the increasing adoption of technology in the times to come, organizations have to plan and strategize for their cloud approach as one of their very important pillars of technology roadmap keeping in mind the above trends.
If you want to know more about the technology trends for 2022 and beyond, in a broader sense, you can also watch the video by Bernard Marr below.
YouTube: 5 Biggest Technology Trends in 2022 Everyone Must Get Ready For Now
Photo credit: The feature image has been done by Elias Herter. The photo in the body of the article was shot by Febra Dilfa.
Source: VMware glossary / Susan Moore (Gartner)
