Evolution of Cloud Computing: A Bit Of Everything, And More - By Shrikant Shitole, CEO, iValue Infosolutions

Here a cloud, there a cloud, everywhere a cloud cloud!

THAT could well be a technocrat’s funny take on the popular children’s rhyme ‘Old MacDonald’. But it is definitely not far from how ubiquitous cloud services have become in the contemporary world.

Cloud computing might sound like a noveau concept, but the truth is that its origin can be traced back to the 1950s when companies started experimenting with distributed computing. Starting with this basic premise, it soon graduated to mainframe, cluster and then grid computing before leapfrogging into virtualisation in the 1980s.

In fact, virtualisation was a gamechanger when it came to cloud computing. The creation of a virtual layer over physical allowed users to run multiple programs simultaneously. It still remains one of the most common use cases ofthe technology.

The other significant pivot came in the early 2000s with the entry of Web 2.0. Suddenly static web pages became more interactive, dynamic and flexible as social media platforms started gaining ground. Data and apps had to be processed in realtime, which gave cloud computing a massive fillip.

Companies realized that processes and applications needed unfettered access that were not bound by the shackles of hardware. They started migrating these from physical data centers to virtual platforms as they quickly deciphered how it could prove advantageous for their day-to-day operations.

The benefits of scalability, collaboration and cost efficiency were driven home during the pandemic when companies were forced to resort to remote operations. By hosting their workloads on the cloud, companies were able to minimise business disruption by ensuring digitized delivery of their offerings when the going was tough.

The Many Facets Of Cloud

The thrust that cloud computing got during the pandemic has seen many enterprises increasingly earmark a larger part of their annual IT budget for cloud offerings and capabilities. However, even before COVID-19 struck, many companies were already banking on public clouds to share their resources globally while maintaining its privacy.

These resources, which often include the hardware, software and associated infrastructure, are owned and operated by a third-party cloud service provider like Microsoft, Azure and delivered over the internet. According to a Gartner report, enterprises worldwide are likely to spend around $480 billion on public cloud services in the next three years.

This growth is unsurprising since public cloud has low asset costs for companies where they only pay for the service they use, without having to worry about the upkeep of the infrastructure either. They gain access to resources on-demand, depending on their fluctuating business requirements.

Private clouds like HP Data Centers are an internal computing network for selective users within an organization. The best analogy for this is a gated community with a strong security perimeter in and muscled watch guards manning all entry and exit points. Given this exclusivity, private clouds offer higher levels of data security and privacy through firewalls and internal hosting than third-party service providers.

Next up is the hybrid cloud environment, which takes elements of public and private cloud environments and fuses it with on-premises infrastructure to create a centralized, distributed computing environment. Companies like IBM provide this win-win offering to enterprises, allowing them to run their legacy or cloud-native workloads with equal ease.

And then there is edge computing, which basically means running fewer processes in the cloud and shifting as many to a network’s edge. By bringing it to local levels like a user’s computer or an IoT device, it reduces the long-distance communication between a client and server, thus bringing down latency and improving performance.

What’s Up In The Clouds

The definition of cloud computing has changed with ease, accessibility and scalability emerging as distinguishing attributes. This means that companies are constantly seeking cloud environments that will work best for their applications, rather than force fitting things the other way around.

For instance, security related applications that need real-time transmission will work best in edge computing, while financial records are safest in private cloud. Many also evaluate their service level agreements regularly to ensure zero-downtime commitments are met and also reduce their dependence on a single service provider or vendor.

This is one reason why the hybrid or multi cloud environment is likely to become more popular. "As enterprises increasingly migrate new and existing workloads to public clouds, including a rising tide of cloud-native applications, multicloud networking is poised to provide modern digital network infrastructure for organizations pursuing the optimal agility, flexibility, resilience, and elastic scale. IDC expects the market for multicloud networking to grow robustly well into the future," explains Brad Casemore, research VP, Datacenter and Multicloud Networking in a research report.

A hybrid cloud architecture circumvents the prohibitive switching costs associated with shifting vendors. It also provides companies with a fail-safe option in case a vendor breaches their SLAs and provides them with a choice of service providers best suited for each workload.

Edge computing will also become more predominant in the future for a simple reason—edge devices are likelier to become a lot more influential. Already, many users are using IoT enabled devices for work, especially those on the field like sales associates and even healthcare professionals.

With time, these devices will require larger amounts of data processing in real-time in addition to sharing it across select networks for feedback and analysis.

5G’s rollout has already given network connectivity a massive boost, and now technocrats will be hardpressed to add AI and ML to applications to respond to user queries faster. Access to this data-backed intelligence will be critical in certain fields like healthcare, media and BFSI, and there will be no scope for latency. Ergo, edge cloud computing will on the radar of most CIOs.

All Hands-On AI

ChatGPT’s debut has brought one phrase on everyone’s lips—generative AI. Needless to say, it has found its place in cloud management too.

As cloud environments become more complex, generative AI can chip in to automate regular tasks like resource allocation and bandwidth management. It can also analyze data patterns to provide predictive insights like customer buying habits or workload movements.

This information can be shared with the relevant teams to take data-backed decisions like customizing personalized sales pitches to clients or monitoring power usage to optimize network operations. By letting AI take charge of these monotonous tasks, a company can redirect its human talent to focus on core assignments, which technology cannot handle automatically.

There are many areas where AI can come in handy in the cloud environment. However, the biggest challenge is that many technocrats are still unsure how to leverage it, especially as it gets more sophisticated with each passing week.