There are a host of trends impacting the cloud market at the moment, and understanding them will give you a better idea not only about industry growth and spending going forwards, but also about how it is necessary to remove the barriers that are still preventing some organizations from adopting.
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Performance optimization is key to migration
It is not just the raw cost of cloud platforms that is central to convincing skeptics that they should shift apps and services away from in-house infrastructures, but also the promise of improved performance that such a move can bring.
Cloud providers are working hard to optimize in this area, with the creation of tools specifically targeting the process of tweaking platform performance for IaaS and SaaS evidencing this.
App portability will encourage uptake
In the past one of the biggest concerns that prospective cloud adopters had was that when signing up with a particular provider, they would effectively be locked into using their platform indefinitely, without the ability to shift to that of a rival vendor if this became sensible.
Thankfully the industry is moving towards a more fluid, interconnected and collaborative culture in which app portability is far more achievable and vendor lock-in is no longer an insurmountable issue for would-be adopters.
Of course the market is not entirely utopian in this respect, so businesses need to keep app portability in mind when procuring cloud services and providers may need to adapt their own platforms to cater to customers who are looking for more flexibility.
Skill deficit stifles the industry
Although the cloud industry is now well established, at the moment the demand for services within it is so great that there are not enough adequately trained and experienced professionals to facilitate all of the migration efforts which are ongoing at the moment.
The fact of the matter is that even with providers working flat out to train the next generation of specialists, the rapid increase in the number of businesses looking to adopt this type of technology is leaving them overburdened, at least to an extent.
This state of affairs is expected to ease off in the coming half-decade, but for the time being the shortage of skilled employees will remain a sticking point.
Resource distribution will increase appeal
One of the biggest complications with cloud adoption in the early days was related to the fact that even if major vendors had capacity to encompass the needs of clients worldwide, they lacked the distributed data center resources to achieve this without some compromises being made.
Today, heaving investment in the rollout of server facilities across wider regions is providing improved coverage in terms of local availability and helping to drive down latency levels while improving performance in other ways.
Some vendors are even taking a pop-up approach to the cloud, meaning that they can shift resources to a specific location to cope with short term, one-off workloads before packing up and moving elsewhere.
All of this combines to mean that adoption makes more sense in the current era than it ever did in the past.
Security is improving
As cloud adoption ramps up, those organizations that have remained reticent about shifting to a remotely hosted infrastructure so far could justify their caution through security concerns, although ongoing improvements in this area leave such criticisms unfounded.
In addition to internal enhancements enacted by vendors, the implementation of stricter data protection regulations in North America and Europe have helped to bolster the levels of protection afforded by the cloud, thus allaying fears that would otherwise have festered.
