2021 has been a huge year for cloud computing. Following the massive uptick of remote working in 2020 due to the pandemic, the cloud has only continued to grow in importance and become an even more vital tool to keep teams connected. According to predictions from Gartner, global spending on cloud services is expected to reach over $482 billion in 2022, up from $313 billion in 2020.
AWS’ annual re:Invent conference, this year held in Las Vegas, also gave lots of reasons to be excited about the future of the cloud and the new ways it can be harnessed to improve flexibility at scale, improve security, make collaboration more efficient, increase productivity, and more. However, with this growth also comes new challenges and threats.
So what does the cloud look like in 2022?
New and exciting use cases
At the re:Invent conference, Amazon announced a new solution to help customers migrate off of their mainframes. Migrating mainframes is incredibly difficult, and currently, organizations have to rely on a lift and shift approach or break the mainframe down into microservices in order to migrate everything over to the cloud. Providing a solution to move all this onto the cloud more quickly and with less risk is just one of the new things cloud providers are starting to offer.
Enterprise-wide cloud migration
Moving to the cloud doesn’t automatically solve problems of visibility, collaboration, and communication (in fact, if not done well, it can make them worse!) but the cloud and cloud tools have the potential to vastly improve these areas if used right. Rather than just deploying cloud tools and platforms to improve specific functions, there is likely to be a shift towards a more holistic, enterprise-wide approach, leading to greater connectivity and collaboration.
Cloud governance & regulations
Along with the move towards enterprise-wide cloud adoption, regulations will have to evolve in order to keep up with these changes. Regulators are now starting to look at an organizations’ response to losing an entire data center region, rather than their ability to recover individual apps. As the major Facebook outage in October showed, these threats are all too real and organizations will need to find innovative solutions for these new problems.
“Easy button” solutions
Cloud providers know that complexity is a major barrier when it comes to cloud migration and adoption. That’s why providers like AWS and Google are starting to develop new ways for customers to easily adopt and use cloud solutions - with the eventual aim that customers will be able to deliver new solutions as easily as turning on a light switch.
Sustainability
Sustainability will also be a key theme in 2022, as it’s no secret that data centers are energy intensive, and we’re only going to be needing more of them. Major cloud providers will be working towards improving the sustainability of their data centers, which is a key concern for many of their customers.
For Cutover, 2022 will be all about helping our customers to accelerate their cloud migration and becoming a core component to cloud governance.
Find out how Cutover can help you accelerate your move to the cloud.