CCS Insight Predicts: The rise and rise of the Cloud

In the final part of our blog series, hot off the back of CCS Insight’s annual ‘Predictions Week: 2021 and Beyond’, we explore the big trends in Cloud.

+ Cloud has arguably been the biggest technology beneficiary of the global pandemic

There’s been a dramatic acceleration and migration to the cloud, particularly since the first lockdown.

The commercial and technological elasticity that the cloud offers has helped firms become remote operations pretty much overnight – and given them the much-needed flexibility to scale up and down in response to changing demand.

CCS Insight Predicts:

“By the end of 2021, half of large firms will have more than 50% of their applications in the public cloud.”

“While the world is still hybrid in nature, there’s no denying that organisations are putting much more of their trust in the public cloud.”

CCS Insight’s Senior IT leadership investment survey 2020 looked at which public clouds are rising in dominance:

• Azure 59% (28% in 2019 – Microsoft has moved into no 1 spot)
• AWS 44% (33% in 2019)
• Google Cloud 44% (15% in 2019)
• IBM 38% (21% in 2019)

Earnest comment:

Tech marketers will breathe a collective sigh of relief. For some time, many have had to not only land their propositions, but at the same time, educate and convince buyers of the benefits of making the leap into the cloud. With this newfound confidence and acceptance of the cloud, it seems that’s one less thing to have to worry about.

+ 2021 will be the year of vertical clouds

Large hyperscalers have historically competed as horizontal platforms, across Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service and Software as a Service – along with security and compliance.

We’re now starting to see moves to address specific needs of industry verticals, such as financial services, healthcare and telco sectors.

Examples:

• This year IBM has launched its financial services cloud
• Microsoft Azure for Health cloud
• AWS has had a government cloud in US since 2011 plus a dedicated telecoms unit since 2016

CCS Insight Predicts:

“In at least 2-3 years, all the major clouds will have dedicated business units and in some cases, fully fledged industry clouds in at least 5 key vertical industries.”

Earnest comment:

As every marketer knows, relevance is everything. Vertical clouds present cloud providers with the opportunity to embed themselves further into key industry sectors – and create greater customer stickiness.

+ 5G Edge has become an important trend in cloud computing in 2020

Cloud service providers and mobile operators are now collaborating to put commercial clouds at the network edge – closer to where processing power is needed.

They’re also increasingly looking at 5G as a means to help their developers build low latency applications, particularly in key areas such as gaming, factory automation, and content streaming.

Thanks to increasing alignment between telcos and cloud providers, cloud developers can now build applications within their cloud environment – and embed these applications directly onto operator 5G networks.

Earnest comment:

‘So what?’ you may say. 5G Edge is a big deal, as it will unlock a whole new bunch of use cases that weren’t previously possible, things like driverless cars and autonomous drones at the extreme end, but also, in the near future, mixed reality – augmented and virtual reality applications – the kind of technologies that can provide really fertile ground for marketers. The commercial opportunity for telcos also cannot be understated – particularly in the B2B space, with the potential for them to redefine their role and reset their margins.

Found this useful? Check out previous posts in this series: Remote Work and Collaboration and AI and a new age of Security and Trust.

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(Header photo: C Dustin on Unsplash)

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