Cloud Computing: Trends, Challenges and Benefits

Observing how our world has changed from traditional infrastructures to becoming more cloud-based. Yes! We are discussing the omnipresent “cloud.” Cloud computing has been around for almost two decades, and despite statistics showing commercial savings, cost-benefit analyses have never been conclusive. Nevertheless, it has changed how companies communicate, store, and exchange information. It has also changed how they manage computing resources.

Cloud computing provides modern organizations with cost savings, scalability, flexibility, efficiency, and security. Instead of using internal systems, 70% of our enterprises operate in the cloud. You may have noticed that buying flight tickets or accessing medical records is no longer a Herculean task. That’s all due to the cloud network services.

Users worldwide access an open pool of resources, including apps, services, servers, data, and computer networks. A privately held cloud or a third-party server makes it possible. It improves data access and eliminates inconsistency in subsequent updates. Additionally, a small amount of administration is necessary.

Cloud services provide flexibility, excellent data storage, improved employee synchronization, and data security. As a result, organizations can make more intelligent decisions about development and growth.

Before delving deep, let’s start by briefly discussing the general characteristics, fundamental concepts, and future trends in cloud computing.

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What is Cloud Computing?

Delivering computing services across a network is referred to as cloud computing. This is because massive volumes of data are stored, managed, and processed through a network of shared and different servers (hosted on the Internet other than a local server or PC), reducing the cost of IT infrastructure.

Cloud integration has immense possibilities and scope. Therefore, the IT industry is divided into three groups.

1) Software as a Service (SaaS)

One or more providers own, distribute, and remotely manage software. Initially, Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS, is a well-liked method for accessing and paying for software. SaaS organizations allow you to rent hosted software rather than install it on your servers. Usually, a subscription fee is paid monthly or annually.

2) Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Customers have on-demand access to computing resources owned and hosted by providers, which are accompanied by storage and networking capabilities.

3) Platform as a Service (PaaS)

PaaS is an extensive group of middleware (application infrastructure) services. These services include business process management, integration, database, and application platforms. This process deviates from conventional on-premise computing using a local server or PC. However, more and more users are not using these conventional techniques.

Over the next 18 months, projections indicate that an additional 5% of companies will transition to a fully cloud-based environment. This foresight suggests that by the conclusion of 2024, nearly 99% of enterprises will have integrated some IT infrastructure into cloud platforms. This trend underscores the continuous momentum and acceptance of cloud technologies among businesses seeking to optimize and modernize their computing environments.

Cloud Computing Stats

1) O’Reilly’s Recent Cloud Adoption Survey Reveals Some Compelling Trends

• Around two-thirds of participants already leverage public cloud services, with 45% also utilizing private cloud solutions, while 55% still depend on traditional on-premises systems.
• Nearly half (48%) plan to move at least half of their applications to the cloud within the next year, and 20% aim to transition all their applications.
• 47% are adopting a cloud-first approach, 30% have gone cloud-native, and 37% expect to reach cloud-native status within three years.
• Only a tiny fraction (5%) are considering a shift back to on-premises infrastructure (cloud repatriation).

2) Projected Enterprise Public Cloud Spending by Expenditure Level for 2024

According to a 2024 report by Statista, enterprise spending on public cloud services is expected to vary widely. The largest share of respondents, 17%, plans to allocate between USD 2.4 million and $6 million annually. This is followed by 14% who intend to spend over USD 60 million, indicating a significant investment in cloud infrastructure. Smaller spending brackets, up to USD 600k, account for only 5% of respondents, reflecting the growing trend toward a substantial financial commitment to global cloud solutions.

3) Future Trends in Cloud Computing

As global spending on cloud computing is estimated to grow to USD 679 billion by 2024, it’s clear that the industry is rapidly increasing. Here are some key statistics that highlight the cloud computing industry trends shaping the cloud computingfuture :

• Data Explosion: By 2025, the world will hold a staggering 200 zettabytes (that’s a trillion gigabytes!) of data, emphasizing the critical need for robust cloud storage solutions.
• Market Growth: The cloud computing market is expected to skyrocket, reaching a value of USD 947.3 billion by 2026, reflecting its pivotal role in driving digital transformation across industries.
• Widespread Adoption: 96% of companies already leverage the public cloud, showcasing its dominance as the go-to solution for enterprises worldwide.
• Private Cloud Usage: Not to be outdone, 84% of companies are also utilizing private cloud solutions, highlighting the growing trend of balancing security with flexibility.
• AWS Leadership: Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to be the most significant public cloud provider, commanding 32% of the market, with competitors like Azure and Google Cloud trailing behind. Microsoft Azure holds a 23% market share, while Google Cloud Platform (GCP) commands 12% of the market.
• Cost Management: Managing cloud spend remains a significant challenge for 82% of cloud decision-makers, underlining the importance of optimizing cloud investments.
• Security Improvements: 94% of businesses report enhanced security post-cloud migration, proving that moving to the cloud can significantly strengthen an organization’s defenses.

These statistics underscore the transformative impact of cloud computing and its vital role in shaping the future of business operations and data management.

Useful link: What is Cloud Computing?

Top Cloud Computing Trends

As more businesses rely on on-demand IT for anything from accounting software to full-fledged IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS solutions, cloud integration remains a vital resource across multiple industries. Let’s look at five of the cloud computing trends you can expect to witness in future cloud computing trends.

1) The Growth of Serverless Computing

Serverless computing is a cloud approach where the customer doesn’t have to deal with infrastructure administration and server provisioning. Instead, cloud service providers manage the supporting infrastructure and distribute computing power according to demand.

What are the benefits of cloud computing is meant to be a business purpose, and serverless computing provides many advantages to a business:

• You don’t pay a set price for a certain amount of bandwidth or storage. Instead, you can go with the pay-as-you-go model.
• The internal team is not responsible for managing the servers.
• The team can spend more time developing new concepts because internal developers don’t have to provision complicated server clusters.
• There is no risk of under or over-provisioning because serverless platforms scale autonomously without the help of internal staff.

Serverless computing is rapidly growing. In the upcoming year, expect more businesses to use serverless solutions, as they offer yet another way to improve team agility and save costs.

According to current predictions, between 2024 and 2026, demand for serverless technologies will increase by 22.6%.

2) Even More Adoptions for AI and ML

All machine learning and AI platforms require significant processing power and data bandwidth, and the cloud is the most cost-effective approach to obtaining these resources. AI and ML technologies complement each other.

AI guides cloud IT services in managing data while obtaining reliable insights into user behavior, trends in cloud computing, preferences, etc. The essence of cloud computing security is to increase AI affordability and accessibility. Cloud computing plays a vital role in creating two emerging AI technologies.

A) Creative Algorithms:

These software tools use machine learning to produce everything from artificial data to works of art. These algorithms can also be used to train different AI systems.

B) Language Modeling:

Programs that understand human languages more accurately are a technology that is expected to change how companies communicate with their customers. Cloud computing will be crucial for businesses to deliver these services to customers and provide the necessary infrastructure for programs with high computational demands.

Not only big companies profit from AI’s usage of cloud network services. The essence of cloud computing service models will become a popular entry point for high-end AI solutions among small and low-tech organizations. Without the cloud, startups, and businesses with smaller resources could not use advanced ML and AI functionalities.

Moreover, cloud computing service providers have allowed companies of all sizes and sorts to create AI/ML products. Since these AI/ML platforms demand a lot of processing power and bandwidth, cloud migration optimization will unavoidably play a significant role in that expansion.

Consequently, experts predict that the AI market size will grow to USD 850.61 billion by 2028.

3) Deploying to the Edge

Edge computing is a new method of processing data that doesn’t conduct activities inside a data center. Instead, processing and storing data occurs on specialized hardware near the network’s edge.

Every edge server has different storage capabilities, networking, and computing, allowing it to perform the following tasks:

• Security
• Network switching and routing
• Load balancing

In 2024, the trend of integrating edge and trends in cloud computing is gaining momentum, forming what is known as the edge-cloud continuum. This synergistic approach enables organizations to leverage both technologies’ strengths for optimal performance, efficiency, and flexibility.

Using both cloud and edge technology allows IT environments to benefit from cloud computing from the cloud while also offering:

• Reduced bandwidth use
• Data processing almost instantly
• Low to no response time lag
• Reduced data transmission rates

Edge computing and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) are two critical technologies poised to play an increasingly important role in the IT landscape in 2023. As organizations seek ways to improve efficiency, security, and agility, these technologies become increasingly attractive solutions.

Edge computing brings computing resources closer to the data source, where they are needed. This can provide several benefits, including reduced latency, improved performance, and increased security. In 2022, it was estimated that at least 40% of organizations would incorporate edge computing into their IT strategies.

This trend is expected to continue in 2023, with an estimated 44% of organizations adopting edge computing. Several factors drive this growth, including the increasing adoption of IoT devices, the need for real-time data processing, and the growing importance of edge security.

With the help of this security architecture, a business may monitor and regulate access to applications of cloud computing and services applications, on-premises infrastructure, and end-user devices. SASE guides in upholding a high standard of security and compliance, two of the primary issues with edge computing.

4) Kubernetes and Blockchain

Kubernetes is a technology that offers a tamper-proof digital ledger that can record data without depending on a centralized authority. Blockchain technology is a game-changer but has scaling issues, particularly massive data management and storage.

A blockchain environment can scale quickly with Kubernetes (K8s), an open-source technology for automating deployments and scaling programs. With several containers running for a single essential service, K8s also offers high availability.

Enterprises will carry on pushing the boundaries of blockchain and K8s in 2024 since they work so well together.

5) More Focus on Cloud Security

Compliance, privacy, and integration problems are the main barriers to adopting cloud computing trends. In response, cloud service providers are providing enhanced cloud security trends feature.

In the feature, we will witness huge demand for:

Secure Access Service Edge (SASE): SASE allows users to manage and regulate access across end-user devices, on-premise IT, and cloud apps.

Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery (DR): A business can use cloud disaster recovery to back up data and create a standby IT environment that can take over if the primary infrastructure fails.

Gaining visibility across many cloud application platforms will also be a priority in 2024. Additionally, business owners desire transparency across all IT environments to close gaps that result in compliance infringements or cyberattacks.

Useful link: What is a Cloud Consultant?

Cloud Computing Challenges

Emerging cloud computing technologies have created numerous challenges for handling data and information. Therefore, if you decide to implement cloud infrastructure services, here are some challenges of cloud computing and risks you can encounter.

1) Privacy and Data Security

Privacy and data security are the two most concerning factors to trends in cloud computing models. Cloud storage of user or business data is vital and private. Encryption, security hardware, and software can solve security and privacy problems.

Identity theft, data breaches, malware infections, and other security issues on the cloud can decline user confidence in your cloud computing applications. This can lead to a heavy loss in revenue alongside stature and reputation. In addition, dealing with cloud computing concerns for small businesses requires sending and receiving a massive amount of data quickly and is vulnerable to data leaks.

2) Cost Management

Without significant investments in new hardware, a company can rapidly increase its processing capacity in the cloud trends. Instead, businesses can use public carriers’ pay-as-you-go strategies to get additional processing. Most of the all-cloud providers offer a “pay-as-you-go” model. It brings down the total cost of the resources being used. However, defining and forecasting quantities and costs can occasionally be challenging due to cloud computing services’ on-demand and scalable nature.

3) Multi-Cloud Environments

Companies now have more options, so they no longer depend on only one cloud provider but several of them. Nearly 84% of these organizations depend on several clouds, most of which employ hybrid cloud strategies. The infrastructure team frequently finds this to be hindering and challenging to manage. The process frequently ends up being extremely complicated for the IT team due to the variations among various cloud infrastructure service providers

4) Performance Challenges

Performance is a crucial factor when considering cloud based solutions. If the cloud performs poorly, users may stop using it, and businesses may suffer. For instance, the minimum latency when loading an app or website might cause a significant decrease in the number of users. This latency may result from ineffective load balancing, which indicates that the server cannot divide incoming traffic effectively for the optimal user experience. Fault tolerance, which refers to the ability for operations to continue even when one or more components fail, also presents difficulties.

5) Portability

Application migration from one cloud provider to another should be simple, which is another challenge for cloud computing applications. Vendor lock-in must be avoided. It is not practicable because each cloud provider utilizes a separate standard language for their systems.

Useful link: What is Cloud Computing Security?

Characteristics of Cloud Computing

With a history spanning several decades, cloud computing concerns have evolved into a contemporary infrastructure that boasts a range of characteristics, delivering significant advantages to businesses of various scales. Among the key attributes of cloud computing applications are the following:

1) Workload Resilience

Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) frequently employ redundant resources to guarantee robust storage and maintain the continuity of users’ critical workloads, often spanning multiple global regions.

2) Multi-tenancy and Resource Pooling

Multi-tenancy enables multiple customers to share joint physical infrastructures or applications of cloud computing while ensuring the privacy and security of their respective data. Cloud industry trends providers efficiently cater to multiple customers using the same physical resources through resource pooling. The resource pools maintained by cloud industry trends providers need to be sizable and adaptable to meet the diverse requirements of multiple customers effectively.

3) Self-service Provisioning

End users can instantly deploy compute resources for various workloads as needed. This involves provisioning computing capabilities like server time and network storage, eliminating the conventional necessity for IT administrators to handle the provisioning and management of compute resources.

4) Broad Network Access

Users can access cloud data or upload information to the cloud from any location and with any internet-enabled device, providing a seamless and convenient experience.

5) Migration Flexibility

Organizations can transfer specific workloads to or from the cloud or between different cloud platforms, either manually based on preference or automatically, to enhance cost-effectiveness and take benefits of cloud computing for emerging services.

Benefits of Cloud Computing

There are various benefits of cloud computing applications, and some of them are

1) Cost Savings

Suppose users worry about the cost of switching to cloud computing infrastructure. It’s not only just you. The initial expense of adopting a cloud-based solution concerns 20% of companies. However, those attempting to balance the benefits and drawbacks of using the cloud computing trends need to consider more than just the initial cost; they also need to consider ROI.

2) Security

When implementing a cloud-based solution, many companies are concerned about security. After all, how can you be sure that files, programs, and other data are protected if they are not housed securely onsite? What stops a cybercriminal from doing the same thing if you can access your data remotely? Well, quite a bit.

One of the responsibilities of cloud based solutions is to monitor security properly. This is substantially more effective than a standard internal system, where a company must divide its resources among a variety of IT issues, security being only one of them.

3) Rapid Deployment and High Speed

Software development’s agility and speed have changed due to the quick creation of new cloud computing platforms. Developers may quickly test new concepts and create application architecture without on-site hardware constraints.

4) Scalability

Distinct businesses have different IT requirements; a massive company with more than 1000 employees will have different needs than a startup. Implementing the cloud computing platform is a fantastic solution since it enables companies to scale up or down their IT departments quickly and efficiently.

5) Backup and Restore Data

Data storage on the cloud based solutions is not limited by available space, which is beneficial for backup and restore operations. End-user data evolves and must be tracked for regulations or compliance requirements. Older software versions can be saved for later stages if a rollback or recovery is required.

Business Benefits of Cloud Computing Services (Infographic)

Conclusion

Understanding why more people use cloud computing every year doesn’t take long. Companies know the advantages, cloud computing industry trends, and challenges of cloud computing implementation and how it impacts their income, security, and teamwork.

Using cloud platform solutions can help an enterprise avoid issues plaguing companies that rely on on-premises technology, including security issues in cloud computing. If users have any queries regarding implementing the cloud efficiently for their business, improving cloud performance, and reducing costs, then it’s time to contact Veritis.

Veritis, the Stevie Awards and Globee Business Award winner, provides companies with cost-effective cloud services to help them change their IT environments. Our expert team also offers cutting-edge cloud computing consulting services that enable businesses to increase their productivity significantly.

Resolve Your Cloud Computing Challenges

Additional Resources:

• Serverless Vs Containers: Comparison Between Top Two Cloud Services
• 10 Emerging Cloud Technologies List That Make ‘Cloud’ Stand-out!
• 9 Keys to Selecting a Right Cloud Managed Services Provider (MSP)
• What is Cloud Continuum and How Businesses Can Leverage it?
• 7 Most-Productive Google Cloud Tools One Must Have!
• Hybrid Cloud Vs Multi Cloud: What’s the Difference!