Cloud Computing’s 7 Biggest Trends of 2020

What are the main evolutionary trends of the Cloud market globally? Following an analysis carried out on a significant number of international secondary sources, the Cloud Transformation Observatory has identified what are the 7 most important market trends in 2020 for the world of Cloud Computing.

Hybrid & Multi Cloud

We are talking about the evolution of companies towards an IT ecosystem that is not only a hybrid between the cloud and on-premises systems, but which also makes use of public Clouds from different providers.

This trend has strong impacts on the world of the Cloud offer because it is linked to the issue of portability and standards, an element of sensitivity for large Cloud providers who, through the latter, try to ensure a competitive advantage on the market. The growing demand for Hybrid and Multi Cloud environments will therefore lead to a necessary rethinking of these logics. Furthermore, this trend increases the complexity of the Information Systems of companies which therefore perceive the urgency of creating a governance layer of these environments, starting from the technological layer of orchestration, and then modifying the processes, organization and skills of the IT Department.

Edge Computing

With this expression we mean the distribution and decentralization of the Information System with the aim of better grasping the opportunities related to data from connected objects (this is the case of the Internet of Things). The Cloud and in particular the PaaS represent an enabling technological element where it is possible to create an IoT platform through pre-configured tools, which allow you to connect physical assets and manage the flow of data in real-time.

Edge Computing is a further step forward for which not only the intelligence in the cloud is used to process data from connected objects, but also the peripheral intelligence closest to the source of the data itself. It involves combining the data processing capabilities in the Cloud with those of local processing points (device or datacenter), creating a hybrid ecosystem in which, depending on the required response times, the type of data to be manipulated and of the analysis to be processed, it is decided where this should be carried out.

Intelligent Cloud

Here the cloud becomes an end-to-end platform for the development and delivery of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence algorithms. The data available to businesses is growing exponentially, is more accessible and incorporates enormous application potential. The Cloud services that store and process them continue to expand and enrich themselves with functionality, including the ability to transform data into action.

Thanks to the Cloud, companies can access these advanced technologies with acceptable times and costs, making use of external technical skills and therefore being able to focus exclusively on the actual business benefits deriving from their adoption. In the area of Artificial Intelligence, the availability of pre-trained algorithms, usable in as a service mode, represents a unique opportunity to innovate products and services, allowing to exploit economies of scale in data learning.

PaaS & Cloud Native architectures

That is, the shift of the Cloud market towards the platform stack and the impact of the cloud on application design. This is a new wave of migration in which we have moved from infrastructural Lift & Shift to Refactoring, ie the total redesign of applications with the aim of fully grasping the advantages of the Cloud.

This is where Cloud Native application architectures come into play, such as microservices, Serverless and Containers, or rather the application design logic typical of Cloud services, devoted to modularity, scalability and standardization. This type of architecture allows not only to better adapt applications to the as a service model, but also to obtain greater visibility and efficiency in managing on-premises application resources. The development environments in PaaS (Platform as a Service) are designed to create custom applications in the Cloud using these architectural paradigms, in order to increase the performance of development activities in the company. The greater demand for customization in the Cloud leads PaaS to have very high growth rates and to become the heart of competition in the supply market.

Cloud culture & organization

This cloud trend is about the structural change that corporate IT departments are experiencing to embrace Cloud Transformation. It is a real revolution that affects professional roles, organizational models and skills. An IT Department that changes its skin, which expands its technical skills to manage increasingly complex and distributed Information Systems, but which is also enriched with “soft” skills with the aim of being closer to business needs.

Hence the need to introduce new professionals, such as the Cloud Security Specialist and the Cloud Architect, and in some cases to also create real centers of competence dedicated to cloud management, to guide their introduction into the company. To manage Cloud Transformation, companies must therefore on the one hand be able to retrain their staff towards new operating models and, on the other, understand the characteristics of the new cloud-centric professionals to which they must become attractive.

Security & Cyberintelligence

Hot topic for IT strategies especially since the new European regulation on the protection of personal data (GDPR — General Data Protection Regulation) came into force and became effectively applicable. This is a trend linked to the previous ones, since security is a key element in the governance of Hybrid and Multi Cloud environments.

It is necessary to update processes and tools in order to manage it continuously throughout the corporate IT ecosystem, for example through robust identity management. As the complexity of Information Systems grows, security becomes an increasingly urgent issue to manage and therefore also the players in the Cloud supply chain make it a strategic focus, using the growing amount of data relating to attack experiences available to them. provide proactive Security services. This is the trend of Cyberintelligence, which over time may make security a push and not a barrier to the use of Cloud services.

Agile, DevOps & IT Automation

That is the need to increase the productivity of development and release of applications to make the company more effective in responding to changes. Agile methodologies are born for the management of application development projects, to which they impose an iterative and incremental approach characterized by frequent releases of working software portions, focusing the effort on the actual priorities and continuously collecting feedback from users.

In the IT field, Agile methodologies find in the Cloud an enabling technological element precisely for what has already emerged in relation to the Platform as a Service, which supports the improvement of productivity and effectiveness of application development activities and allows the use of DevOps tools that enable the release and automated and continuous integration of the software. However, such an approach is not advantageous only for technological projects, but is potentially applicable to any type of initiative, in the face of an important cultural and organizational change within companies.