By Massimo Bandinelli, Marketing Manager, Aruba Enterprise
We’re entering a new phase of cloud adoption. Having migrated at least some of their resources to the cloud, organisations are now looking to modernize their IT infrastructure to unlock further flexibility and scalability. Or in other words, they’re moving away from ‘legacy infrastructure operating in the cloud’ towards ‘modern infrastructure built for the cloud’.
Let’s examine some of the trends we’re seeing in this brave new world.
- Interest in cloud-native apps is soaring
In recent months, we’ve seen demand for cloud-native software take off as organisations re-examine their application portfolios. Unlike legacy software, cloud-native apps are made up of modular components based on microservices and containerisation. This has several key advantages.
First and foremost, cloud-native apps are much quicker to build and deploy than legacy software. Secondly, developers can quickly and independently reconfigure the modular components that make up cloud-native apps. By contrast, with legacy apps running in the cloud, making any changes would require downtime as the entire app was updated.
At a wider business level, the ongoing, iterative process of rearchitecting legacy apps enables organisations to be more agile, flexible and above all innovative – which brings us neatly onto the next trend.
- AI is going mainstream
It’s now becoming more common for finance, IT and even marketing teams to use AI-based software to automate manual processes and enhance decision-making. Recent research by the UK government found that around 2% of the country’s businesses are already using AI, and around 10% are currently planning to implement at least one AI-based technology.
Cloud-native software and apps enable organisations to take advantage of AI in a way that simply isn’t possible with legacy solutions – even when they’re running in the cloud. With this in mind, IT leaders should have AI-based technologies on their radar as a potential future driver of cloud adoption.
- More organisations are turning to hybrid cloud solutions
After the flurry of hurried cloud migrations during the height of the pandemic, many IT leaders learned the hard way that not everything belongs in the cloud. As such, we’re seeing more organisations turning to hybrid cloud solutions, which seamlessly combine cloud and on-premises storage.
Unlike a public cloud solution, hybrid cloud is fully customisable and scalable, allowing organisations to prepare for all eventualities – whether they need to scale up resources suddenly due to a spike in demand, or store sensitive data on-premises where it’s more secure.
- As organisations become more cyber-aware, investment in disaster recovery is increasing
The cyber threat landscape is more complex and fast-moving than ever. It’s now routine for organisations in all sectors to be hit with ransomware, malware, DDoS and other attacks. So much so, that cyber security isn’t just top of the agenda for CIOs, but for CEOs and CFOs too!
Bringing systems back online following a cyber-attack can be extremely costly. Not to mention the wider impact of downtime – dented customer confidence, employee morale and organisational reputation. That’s why more organisations are choosing a cloud provider based on their disaster recovery protocols, to ensure their systems are restored as quickly as possible following an attack.
We’re also seeing more cloud providers offering disaster recovery ‘as a service’. This enables organisations to back up their cloud data in a separate environment in case of an attack, as well as automatically initiating seamless disaster recovery orchestration.
- Organisations are prioritising the efficiency of their cloud infrastructure
What do rising energy prices, wider inflationary pressures, and increased awareness of environmental issues have in common? They’re all feeding a desire to drive efficiency in every area of cloud computing.
Rather than simply growing capacity to meet their needs, both data centre operators and their customers are looking at new ways to minimise costs, reduce energy use, and architect cloud infrastructure to be as efficient as possible. Above all, we can expect this trend to continue into 2023 and beyond.
