Cloud.in Wrap-up/Review 2022 on Cloud Computing/Services - highlights - Rahul S Kurkure, Founder & Director, Cloud.in

Cloud Computing is acknowledged and endorsed as a valuable technology in recent years, and this is very evident from its high growth, globally.  The cloud computing market is growing rapidly and is driven by the growing adoption of cloud computing and related technologies for the numerous benefits they deliver.  These include higher levels of productivity, flexibility, scalability, better security, increased efficiency, agility, improved performance, promote sustainability, and cost-effectiveness as well.  In the post-pandemic phase across the year, several changes related to cloud services taking shape were seen.  Captured here are some of the developments we witnessed in the cloud services space this past year.

Increase in public cloud adoption

Since the onset of the pandemic, there has been an increase in organizations adopting public cloud.  India remained among the fastest-growing market for public cloud service providers with more organizations adopting the cloud for digital innovation, a key business objective. Among the numerous cloud providers, the market leaders, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud accounted for the majority of the total 2022 cloud market, followed by IBM, Alibaba, Oracle, and other smaller companies.  The larger three market giants consolidated their leadership in the cloud market with AWS leading the market leadership.  The growing maturity of the cloud market and the need to scale led to consolidation with increasing merger and acquisition activities as well.

Embracing hybrid and multi-cloud approaches rose

As already mentioned, public cloud benefits are numerous.  However, there was a demand for private cloud too, in cases where data was to stay in the organization for privacy and security reasons besides regulatory purposes.  Organizations increasingly opted for hybrid cloud models and got the best from both worlds – private and public. 

In addition to this, to avoid getting into a vendor lock-in, many more organizations embraced multi-cloud environments and distributed their workload, and aligned it with relevant cloud services for specific use cases.

Cloud technology enabled better delivery of AI services

Although AI came into existence much before cloud computing, the latter has in turn improved AI to a great extent.  Cloud computing models and cloud delivery helped to shape AI use cases better and made them more efficient.  Furthermore, businesses have become more strategic and insight-driven in recent days.  Platforms of Machine Learning, a subset of AI needed higher levels of processing power besides data bandwidth for training and processing huge volumes of data and that was made possible by leveraging cloud computing.

Serverless Cloud gained more traction

Amazon- AWS Lambda, Microsoft – Azure Functions and IBM Cloud Functions are some of the Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) or serverless cloud.  This architecture was adopted by more organizations, where the network and virtual machine operating systems management were outsourced to the cloud service providers.  The organization’s DevOps teams were able to focus only on the application code without having to manage the infrastructure.  In this kind of architecture, though it is called serverless, servers exist, but there is a layer of abstraction between the user and the platform, thereby helping to optimize resources and associated costs.  These technologies enable automatic scaling, and high availability while delivering the pay-for-use billing model leading to increased agility and cost optimization.

The challenge of growing cloud spend

Across several organizations, a significant cloud spend was wasted that was regarded as a business issue because cloud costs were continuously increasing.  Organizations struggled to control the growing costs.  Cloud waste is the expenditures on cloud resources in the complex, multi-cloud environment that are either unused or underused, or overprovisioned.  This cloud-cost challenge has had implications for the organization’s bottom lines.  However, with cloud spending involving significant costs, organizations have also begun to prioritize strategies and tools to optimize cloud spend and reduce waste.

Edge Computing became popular

Today, along with the Cloud, another category of computing, that is edge computing is gaining traction. In this new distributed computing model, the processing and storing of data is close to where it is generated or created, or “at the edge”.  This helps in increasing application performance and decreasing latency issues.  Although this approach is still in its infancy stage it is already showing a lot of promise across industries, such as agriculture, healthcare, smart energy grids, and others.

The higher computing power at the edge enabled DevOps teams to increase efficiency and productivity and focus on activities of higher value.  

To stay ahead of the curve in today’s competitive marketplace organizations know the importance of “cloud” and the key role it plays in their business strategy.  From agility and scalability to sustainability and performance, while delivering high business value, the benefits of cloud services are many. Enterprises require clarity of the process and a robust cloud strategy, architecture, migration, and cost management, far from the past siloed approach, to succeed in today’s ever-changing digital world.