The tech landscape is always in flux. Businesses wanting to stay relevant must keep abreast of the latest trends and leverage them for competitive advantage. Here are the top enterprise IT and cloud trends driving the market now.

The emergence of Generative AI (GenAI) in the cloud

The emergence of Generative AI has disrupted the tech landscape big time. 

The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT triggered an arms race among IT players, each vying to develop their large language models (LLMs). Cloud providers push GenAI-powered services to break out of their sluggish revenue growth. 

All three major cloud service providers are integrating GenAI into their cloud offerings. 

Microsoft has embedded ChatGPT features into its products, including MS Word, MS Excel, the Edge browser, and Azure OpenAI. Google is developing its own LLM called PaLM. Vertex AI is Google’s new industry-specific AI-based service. AWS’s Bedrock enables enterprise software developers to embed Gen AI functionality into programs. AWS also builds low-cost AI chips.

Other players are also vying for a share of the GenAI market.

IBM has launched WatsonX, an open-stack AI platform. Nvidia, known for GPUs, has also created DGX Cloud, a full-stack AI-powered cloud platform. This resides in the Oracle cloud and will soon be available on both Azure and Google Cloud.

These offerings enable enterprises to integrate generative AI into their operations. CIOs can choose from multiple cloud-based options to embed GenAI into business processes.

Increased focus on security

Security has always been a headache for enterprise IT. The headache worsens with the widespread adoption of Artificial Intelligence, especially GenAI. Enterprises face risks on multiple fronts, such as

Becoming victims of AI-powered malware attacks

The risk of AI-generated deep fakes and phishing attempts.

Data privacy issues, such as sensitive data finding its way into the general pool of GenAI data and the use of such data to train GenAI algorithms. 

Traditional security models no longer suffice to meet such threats. Zero Trust, which verifies every user and device trying to access resources, at every instance, is fast becoming the default. Enterprises also use AI-powered tools to protect their networks from the latest threats.

Hyperautomation on full-spree

The rise of AI coincides with hyper-automation. Businesses continue to automate tasks across various functions. Cutthroat competition and pressure on margins push businesses to invest in automation. Businesses use automation to improve efficiency and cut operational costs. Automation improves process accuracy and frees up human workers for more strategic tasks.

Increased focus on data

Data has become all-important in today’s digital era. Easy access to data empowers the workforce to make data-driven decisions. But enabling such easy access requires:

Eradication of data silos and establishing a single source of truth. APIs and connectors do the job to some extent. But a sustainable solution requires centralising data by setting up cloud-based data lakes.

Robust analytics software that can extract actionable insights from relevant data.

Strong data governance policies make the right trade-off between transparency and confidentiality. It also ensures the responsible use of data.

User-friendly data visualisation tools.

Cloud price creep 

Tough competition has resulted in cloud service providers holding the line on price increases until now. But a combination of factors has resulted in substantial price hikes of late.

The general slowdown has led to stagnant revenues, forcing providers to increase costs to remain profitable.

Providers face pressure from investors to harvest returns on investments. Tech investments have a short shelf life before they become obsolete.

New technology, such as hyperscalers, adds more expensive GPUs to the mix of traditional CPUs. Providers pass on the costs to enterprise customers. Services involving the latest chips come at premium prices. For instance, running the workload on an Nvidia H100 chip versus an earlier model A100 involves a price increase of more than 220%.

The costs of deploying GenAI are also increasing, and enterprises have started feeling budgetary pressures. Making matters worse is the lack of transparency or clarity in GenAI pricing. A case in point is SAP’s new pricing tier for GenAI functionality, an opaque mix of bundled and usage-based pricing. 

In what is a portent of things to come, IBM increased its prices for storage services, IaaS and PaaS offerings by as much as 26%, starting January 2024. 

The distinction between cloud and on-premises getting blurred 

Businesses have been adopting a multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategy for quite a while now. Such a strategy allows them to keep sensitive data under their direct control while still leveraging the benefits of the cloud. 

However, a clear distinction between cloud and on-prem no longer exists, thanks to the rise of the edge. Edge computing brings processing power and storage closer to the devices generating data. This enables faster data processing and real-time decision-making, which in turn enables IoT.

Dedicated Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (DCIaaS) has been gaining traction recently. DCIaaS offers private cloud infrastructure with the consumption-based pricing of traditional cloud services. Customers can run DCIaaS on their in-house data centre or in a certified colocation facility. Either way, they get an isolated set of computing and storage resources with strong control over data location. Such a model offers stronger security and data privacy with less risk of unauthorised access. There is also lower latency for critical workloads.

The challenge for CIOs is to stitch together the needed scalability, elasticity, and other attributes. They also have to ensure consumption-based pricing. 

The latest managed services, such as AWS Outposts and Microsoft Azure Stack, enable services on-premises or at the edge. Traditional hardware vendors, such as Dell Apex and HPE greenLake, now offer as-a-service offerings that can run in data centres or at the edge.

Increased interoperability

A multi-cloud strategy allows for the best features and services from different providers.

Cloud vendors work on business models that lock in customers and get them used to that vendor’s tools and processes. But enterprise customers prefer a multi-cloud approach and try to avoid vendor lock-in.

In the stand-off, vendors have blinked first, as barriers to interoperability have started to come down.

A case in point is Microsoft and Oracle’s recent launch of Oracle Database@Azure. Customers can run Oracle’s database services on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and deploy them in Microsoft Azure data centres. 

NetApp’s managed service delivers workloads across Linux and Windows to Google Cloud. The transfer takes place seamlessly, without the need to refactor code or redesign processes.

The rising popularity of industry clouds 

The shift to the cloud continues unabated, but the nature of cloud adoption is also changing. The preference is now for modular cloud platforms with microservices architecture. 

In this context, industry clouds, or pre-built specialised cloud platforms, have become popular. These clouds address the unique needs and challenges of a specific industry or sector. It co-opts the tools, workflows, and data models tailored to a particular industry.

The popularity of industry clouds is on the rise in sectors such as finance, media, healthcare, and retail. These clouds accelerate workflows, deliver huge efficiency improvements, and offer flexibility. 

Citizen developer tools scale newer heights

The popularity of low-code/no-code development platforms continues to rise. Many business executives use Microsoft’s Power Platform to create apps that interact with business tools. GenAI tools such as ChatGPT have delivered a paradigm leap in citizen developer tools. Microsoft Copilot now allows users to create code with a simple prompt.

Citizen developer tools allow the creation of applications without depending on programmers. Of late, these tools have become instruments to improve business agility and further innovation.

But on the flip side, citizen development tools can increase shadow IT. These software do not scale, interoperate with business processes, and increase security risks.

FinOps gains traction

After the mad dash of shifting workloads to the cloud, many enterprises are now experiencing sticker shock. 

As enterprises seek a solution, FinOps has become a popular approach to manage and optimise cloud costs. FinOps enables enterprises to reduce technical debt and \ rationalise cloud costs. Adopting the FinOps approach allows enterprises to fix mistakes such as using the wrong cloud services or too much data movement.

The cloud market has matured and stabilised. All the major players have similar offerings. In terms of market share, AWS remains the market leader, with a 33% share of cloud infrastructure. Microsoft Azure is second with 22% of the cloud infrastructure, and Google Cloud is a distant third with 11%. Other vendors, such as IBM, Oracle, and Salesforce, share around 2% to 3% each.