The popularity of the cloud beats predictions. 59% of enterprises expect cloud usage to exceed their 2020 estimates. Forrester estimates the global public cloud spending at near $300 billion. But side-by-side, the nature of the cloud is changing. This IT blog for technology professionals lists the top enterprise cloud strategies today. Smart CIOs benchmark these trends to optimise ROI from their cloud investments.

1. The Expanding Scope of the Cloud

The Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report confirms Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS,) Database-as-a-service (DaaS), and Container-as-a-service(CaaS) as the top three cloud services. IaaS and PaaS markets have grown twofold over the last couple of years and will grow double again in the next three years.

Side-by-side, new growth areas emerge in cloud computing. The next growth area is Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS.) An IBM report pegs the average cost of a data breach at $3.92 million. Gartner estimates the average cost of IT downtime at $5,600 per minute. Enterprises look to DRaaS as a fail-safe for critical data and applications. IDC estimated the worth of the DRaaS market at $4.5 billion in 2020, with a 15.4% CAGR through 2023.

2. The Emergence of Hyper-scale Data Centers and Serverless Computing

The increasing demand for scalability prompts cloud providers to deploy hyper-scale data centres. Hyper-scale data centre market will touch $80.65 billion by 2022, at a CAGR of 26.32%. Cisco pegs hyper-scale data centres to handle 55% of data centre traffic this year.

Hyper-scale data centres are modular, making it easy to change individual physical components. This improves flexibility.

The increasing demand for hyper-scale makes pay-as-you-go serverless computing models popular. In conventional cloud services, users rent server space. In serverless computing, users pay for code execution. The customer writes and deploys code without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. For instance, Google’s Knative offers an open API and runtime environment, to run serverless workloads anywhere. The model uses servers, but the users do not pay for fixed bandwidth or servers. They pay only when the code runs. The big advantage of serverless computing is auto-scaling in response to demand.

3. The Growing Popularity of Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Stacks

Public cloud use continues to grow across enterprises. But many enterprises stay away from the cloud, fearing loss of control over their data. Also, many enterprises relying on the public cloud lose money by over-provisioning.

Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud models deliver the best of both worlds. Gartner estimates the hybrid cloud market to touch $97.6 billion by 2023, at a CAGR of 17 per cent. The advantages include cost efficiency, resilience, scalability, agility, and security. Users also get better control over business-sensitive data.

Today, 93% of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy, and 87% of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy. Multi-cloud comes in different variants, the most common stack being a mix of multiple public and multiple private clouds. On average, an enterprise uses over two public and two private clouds. 46% of enterprises have automated policies for governance, making governance easy.

4. Increasing Preference for Multi-Vendor Strategy

Enterprises no longer find value in a long-term relationship with a single cloud vendor. Enterprises, having wised up to the humongous port-out costs, takes a conscious effort to avoid vendor lock-in.

Most enterprises today get cloud services from two or more vendors. The common picks include Amazon Web Services (AWS) for customer-facing apps, Azure for business services and Google Cloud Platform for analytics. But most businesses deal with any vendor for specific business cases. Several start-ups build their niche in emerging technologies such as AI and offer attractive terms.

5. The Rise of Containers

Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud fuels the demand for application portability. The client workload in a multi-cloud environment spans different clouds.

The go-to strategy in 2020 was shuttling apps back and forth between public and private clouds. 73% of enterprises have repatriated some apps from the public cloud to internal systems. The motives include cost and security considerations.

Containers make it easy for enterprises to port their apps to the cloud, and run applications across disparate systems. Kubernetes automates the deployment and management of containers. It facilitates rapid scale, enabling continuous innovation.

Service meshes stitch together microservices and reduce administrative and programming overhead. Some top meshes include AWS App Mesh, Google Anthos, and others.

Forrester Research estimates one in every three organizations to test containers for production. More than 70% of enterprises will soon run two or more containerised applications in production. IDC predicts 95% of new microservices deployed in containers, in 2021.

6. Upgrading Apps

By now, most enterprises have realized migrating to the cloud delivers only limited advantages by itself. For instance, migrating legacy applications without optimization only transfers performance issues from on-premises to the cloud.

But upgrading all applications is unviable and unnecessary. Smart enterprises migrate some apps without changes, and re-architect other apps, depending on the business utility.

Mobile cloud computing, which fuses the cloud and mobility, is the next big thing. The model entails hosting and operating mobile applications through the cloud, to reduce maintenance costs, tighten security, and improve privacy. Enterprises adopting mobile cloud computing models ensure consistency and push through critical updates across employee devices easily.

7. Reinventing the Cloud Ecosystem

Technology enrichment alone does not deliver a competitive advantage. The cloud is only a medium. Using the cloud to drive innovation requires a change in the connected people, processes, and culture.

• Reskill the workforce, with a focus on container orchestration, microservices, and DevOps. For instance, upskill from Java and .NET programming languages to Java Spring, Python and other modern languages.
• Shift to product-based delivery models. Enable developers to work in product-focused teams. 
• Restructure the hierarchy, empowering team ownership. Make the IT and the business operate in lockstep with one another.

Despite the advances and popularity of cloud computing, only one in five enterprise applications run in the cloud. The major barriers are legacy IT investments, resistance to change, and slow corporate buy-in. The emerging trends offer convincing solutions to such trends. The growth of the cloud to date is just the tip of the iceberg.