Cloud services have seen incredible growth over the past few years. The provision of IaaS and PaaS has revolutionized how many businesses work. But the process has come with challenges, and not everything has run smoothly. Here, Stephan Fabel the Director of Product at Canonical (the publisher of Ubuntu) explains five trends he expects to see dominate cloud computing in 2020.

Multi-cloud environments have been a hot topic for the last year. Already, businesses have been realising the benefits of a vendor-agnostic approach, which not only minimises costs but gives them the freedom to innovate. However, there are a couple of aspects of operations which will be key in ensuring multi-cloud remains viable for enterprises in the long-term.

Despite the freedom which comes with a vendor neutral ecosystem, cloud orchestration still hasnt yet overcome the headache associated with migrating workloads between these different cloud infrastructures. The past year saw major cloud players like IBM making acquisitions to address this, but as yet, they havent found a successful solution. Over the next year, this will be a priority for enterprises looking to remove the bottlenecks in their CI/CD pipeline. Organisations will invest in cloud computing services which can help them harness a multi-cloud ecosystem, by supporting fast deployment, scalability, integration and operational tasks across public and private clouds.

Another piece of the puzzle will be in observability and monitoring across clouds. To ensure operations are maintained across the entire ecosystem and that they are fulfilling the workloads, the components for observability must be in place. This becomes complex in a multi-cloud infrastructure, where the same level of visibility and governance must be applied across instances. 2020 will be the year public cloud providers start to put these projects together, and already we are seeing the first instances of this with the likes of Google Anthos.

There has been a lot said about cloud repatriation of late. While this wont be a mass exodus from the cloud - in fact quite the opposite, with public cloud growth expected to increase - 2020 will see cloud native organisations leveraging a hybrid environment to enjoy greater cost savings.

For businesses starting out or working with limited budgets, which require an environment for playing around with the latest technology, public cloud is the perfect place to start. With the public cloud, you are your own limit and get immediate reward for innovation. But as these costs begin mounting, its prudent to consider how to regain control of cloud economics.

Repatriating workloads to on-premise is certainly a viable option, but it doesnt mean to say that we will start to see the decline of cloud. As organisations get past each new milestone in the development process, repatriation becomes more and more of a challenge. What we will likely see is public cloud providers reaching into the data centre to support this hybrid demand, so that they can capitalise on the trend.

The US Department of Defenses decision to award the 10-year contract for its JEDI project to Microsoft will prove to be a watershed moment, serving as a trigger for more government agencies to move applications and unify information in the public cloud. The lure of major Federal spending will drive other cloud providers to compete in this multi-billion dollar space.

One of the biggest impacts will be the need to raise endpoint security and compliance standards in the public cloud. Government bodies work to extremely high requirements, which will now be placed on cloud providers and will have a spillover effect on the sector as a whole. This will include higher standards for how hybrid environments are architected and the need for a complete data separation between public cloud and on-premise environments. It will also encourage a move away from the outsourcing model as organisations will seek to build up their in-house cloud skills to meet requirements.

While this will primarily impact the US cloud market, it will also have ripple effects for other markets. The hyperscale providers are global in nature and so will be required to adjust their policies and practices for jurisdictions such as Post-Brexit United Kingdom, where there will be new standards around data protection and data separation from non-UK entities.

The state of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) in business has matured from a nebulous vision into tangible deployments. Companies are now giving a much heavier focus to AI/ML and are reorganising their IT service management and business operations to cater for the trend. Were observing this first hand through Kubeflow, where we see scores of startups and established enterprises joining every day to explore that they can do with AI/ML and how they can make deployments easier.

One specific area thats already being enhanced by AI is in networking. Were working with several IT and telecoms companies in this area that want to build better networks and gain far deeper insight into how those networks are being used across everything from optimising power consumption through to the automation of maintenance tasks. In 2020 we will see the focus around AI/ML in the networking space get bigger than ever as more and more case studies emerge.

Kubernetes has become an integral part of modern cloud infrastructure and serves as a gateway to building and experimenting with new technology. Its little surprise that many companies we observe are doubling down on the application and reorienting their DevOps team around it to explore new things such as enabling serverless applications and automating data orchestration. We think this trend will continue at strength in 2020.

On a more cautious note, we may also see some companies questioning whether Kubernetes is really the correct tool for their purposes. While the technology can provide tremendous value, in some cases it can be complex to manage and requires specialist skills. As Kubernetes is now commonly being used for production at scale, it becomes increasingly likely that users encounter issues around security and downtime.

As a result of these challenges, we can expect the community will mature and in some cases come to the viewpoint that it might not be right for every application or increase the need to bring in outsourced vendors to aid with specialised expertise.

Stephan Fabel is the Director of Product at Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu.

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5 trends shaping the cloud in 2020 - TechRadar

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Ensuring timely termination of cloud instances isnt merely crucial to cost-effectiveness

Cloud computing is booming. As revealed by IDG, 90 percent of organisations worldwide will have some aspect of their business operations running on the cloud this year, with the rest expected to catch up by 2021, writes Kevin J Smith, Senior VP at Ivanti.

Interestingly, experts have found that the UK is leading the way in this regard. In a recent report which sorts businesses into four categories based on their cloud adoption rate, Infosys classifies British companies as Torchbearers the most advanced.

Theres no questioning the significant benefits of agility, collaboration and productivity when it comes to cloud computing, and the ability to spin up new cloud environments whenever needed is invaluable. Unfortunately, there can be too much of a good thing.

Gartner observed that less than 30 percent of organisations have a documented cloud computing strategy which is a clear indicator that organisations are splashing the cash on cloud applications without a clear plan to realise ROI. This consequently then leads to the costs and risks associated with cloud sprawl. With cloud computing so crucially functional to digital transformation, what can companies do to better manage their cloud investment and see tangible business outcomes?

Lets start with the basics assessing precisely what the business need is for cloud. In order to effectively plan for cloud spend, organisations need to have clear insight into how its teams are using cloud services, what cloud capacity is needed to continue doing great work, which cloud instances are being used profitably and which are superfluous. A great tool that can help shed light on current cloud use is an IT Service Management (ITSM) solution this is a precious ally which can be leveraged to capture and track all cloud instance requests. As a result, organisations should be able to keep a detailed inventory, with each cloud environments relevant attributes, and maintain it in such a way the landscape profile is constantly updated. These practices may seem tedious but they are the first steps on the journey to better cloud landscape management.

No one likes to be the bad guy and say no however, unrestricted applications are a real money burner. Ensuring IT budgets are being wisely spent means screening requests for cloud environments and sometimes rejecting them. Each new cloud application or platform should undergo a strict approval process. Requests should feature a short business case elaborating on why that particular cloud instance is required, how much it will cost and how it will benefit the business. Leverage identity management tools for access controls and privilege management, including what configurations can be authorised to whom and for how long. Speaking of authority and approvals, a businesss cloud landscape should have an owner in charge of managing cloud environments across their entire lifecycle. It could be an individual, or a group for instance, a Cloud Approval Board. In general, IT leaders should take ownership of these processes as their skills and experience enable them to establish how, for example, a cloud solution can help the company meet one of its business objectives.

As teams continue to create, innovate and ideate, they will inevitably spin up cloud instances for short-term projects and, sometimes, these can be forgotten and left running once the work is completed with the cash register ringing along with them. Thats why establishing preset end dates on all applications is crucial to efficient cloud resource administration. Businesses can simplify this process by deploying an automated solution which can independently enforce end dates based on policies and rights. This is not only functional to containing cloud spend, but also to ensure cloud-related activities dont bypass stakeholders, who in this way can view relevant dashboards and have an overview of all cloud resources whilst running, and not just at the end of the billing cycle. Combining automation with identity management tools can also help ensure cloud-based apps are not running long after the employee who was utilising them has left the business or switched units making those applications irrelevant. Ensuring timely termination of cloud instances isnt merely crucial to cost-effectiveness, it also has a security aspect: automating application control upon staff offboarding serves to prevent security breaches or data thefts which may be caused by unmanaged rogue applications or unauthorised access.

The phenomenon of cloud sprawl is not showing signs of slowing down as experts predict global cloud waste will hit over $14 billion this year. Its time for businesses to improve governance of cloud computing and make sure the resources they invest in fit in with their wider business plan. By forecasting cloud computing needs and erasing redundant cloud costs, companies can preserve budget for new emerging strategic and innovative tasks.

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We Need to Talk About Cloud Sprawl - Computer Business Review

Sometimes the greatest truths make no sense. Thats not just a paradox, its also the definition of one.

Finding the truth at the heart of certain contradictions may be the best way to move forward.

Here is a list of paradoxes about the modern world of technology and work. Besides providing work-type entertainment, this list is intended to make a larger point about contending with the great technological changes of our time: When youre in a landscape of technological novelty as dramatically different as ours is from even the recent past (Pocket computer smartphones! Cloud computing! Artificial intelligence!), locating the major landmarks can be a challenge. Some features are too novel to be well comprehended or applied. Language that described the previous world struggles to describe interactions of the new.

Finding the truth at the heart of certain contradictions may be the best way to move forward. Here are some attempts at new ways of seeing, via illuminating paradoxes:

1.The worlds biggest computer is also the most personal.

The big clouds are global computing systems with over a million servers apiece, cleverly networked to represent millions more computers. At any given time, millions and billions of people are diving in and out of these systems, enjoying their email, their version of the internet, their business experience, etc. No two users are the same, and a service like Google Cloud strives to anticipate particular business and personal needssome configured by the user, some utilize artificial intelligence agents that enable people to write and find documents more effectively.

By comparison, servers and PCs, sold individually by the millions, have traditionally deliveredimpersonal experiences. The more individualized experiences that we enjoy through these devices today derive largely from the connection of servers and PCs to the cloud, infusing what was limited and cold with unbounded potential for customization.

2.In a digital world of eternal storage, vanishing analog moments rule.

A couple of years back, I calculated that 100 years ago, it cost about $30 in todays money both to see the opera star Enrico Caruso and to buy one of his records. These days, recorded music is basically free on YouTube or other services, and the average price of a ticket for Springsteen on Broadway was almost $1,800 on the open market.

I believe that the reason for this, and the reason for the explosion of conferences and live business events, is that as the number of digital moments has exploded, authentic human moments have become relatively scarce. Adding to the irony, we are seeing smart ways companies are using digital technology to make the human experience more vivid, like when a sports company offers an app for a better experience navigating a sports stadium.

This observation brings me to the next paradox.

3.The jobs are going! Here come the jobs!

Theres significant concern that millions of people will have their lives turned upside down by robots and artificial intelligence (AI). Maybe so, though predictions are mixedthis well-researched McKinsey study projected both major job losses and major job gains.

While weve seen some robots doing relatively simple tasks, like moving things around warehouses, the impact on manual labor so far has been relatively smalland for good reason. Jobs like mowing a lawn or driving a truck turn out to require a lot of contextual judgement.

Meantime, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says there are now about 357,000 personal trainers in the U.S., and the category is expected to grow at 13% over the next decade, faster than the average job. There are 160,000 massage therapists, growing at 22%. And 55,000 marriage and family therapists, growing 22%. You get the picture: Were putting more money toward people who look at us, touch us, and listen to us the way machines dont.

And thats before we get to the jobs that didnt exist 15 years ago: drone pilot, mobile app developer, social media manager, machine learning specialistyou get the idea.

4.Specialize, especially by focusing on general relationships.

In our new data-centric world, software developers who are also experts in a companys core business are often highly valued. Thats because connected products, the digital expression of that core business, now collect information about the products performance in real time, and developers can build in adjustments based on user demands or changing market conditions.

As AI becomes more important, domain-specific data plays an increasingly critical role in how products are built and optimized. The most successful developers have not just the domain expertise of a specialist, but an understanding of what data around that domain matters most, how its collected, and how to keep it free of bias. Its the reason that big technology companies increasingly employ experts in healthcare or transportation or retail, for example, rather than simply hiring engineers with generalized skill sets. No data stands alone, and how things relate matters too.

5.Information is easy. Questions are hard.

A related point to the above: AI can move through unimaginable amounts of data, finding previously unknown patterns and insights. That doesnt mean the patterns are valuable, as this entertaining chart shows. If you take all of your companys data, petabytes of it, and only focus on demanding that it make you more money, youre likely to end up with garbage.

Ask specific questions, however, prioritized based on a companys core competitive advantages and the best-quality data, and youll likely get the most useful results. This can be difficult, but is critically important to deriving real value from data.

6.The only certainty is approximation.

Im lifting this one from an observation by Jeff Dean, the head of Googles research and AI efforts. He notes that advanced AI, like deep learning, doesnt indicate decisions based on certainty, but on likelihood (what he terms gradient points in the direction of improvement). Moreover, given the many layers and sequences of a deep learning system, sometimes its hard to figure out exactly how the system came to its conclusion. Its a machine that isnt always good at explaining itself, unlike, say, a car engine, which can be observed and understood with a lot of certainty (a little bit of gasoline is ignited by a spark plug, causing a piston to move).

In a world increasingly dependent on statistical approximation, many of our existing legal and social rules, which are premised on an illusion of certainty, may be challenged.

7.In an uncertain new world thats full of cutting-edge technology, the best advice can be found in an 85-year-old religious poem.

T.S. Eliot nailed our situation in one of the choruses from The Rock: They constantly try to escape / From the darkness outside and within / By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.

In other words, no matter how much we understand and perfect the world, well all still have the hard work of trying to be good. Machines dont fix that.

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The New Paradoxes of the Cloud Computing World - Forbes

Switching to Cloud Computing means, first and foremost, exponentially increasing computing power and storage space. This is accompanied by a significant reduction in costs. The cloud is a decisive move to on-demand and pay-per-use, without the need for costly investment in hardware, software (which becomes available in an as-a-Service mode), or data centers.

Then there are the enormous benefits of flexibility and scalability, which are especially relevant in the current environment.These are just some of the advantages of cloud computing. To go deeper into this topic, check out our recent post.

No matter the sector, the cloud has had a major, like no other technology in the current landscape.

In this post, we will focus on the Utility Industry, a large sector that is important for the economy at large, but also for the individual customer, who is also experiencing a phase of unprecedented transformation in recent years.

The Utilities and Energy industry is in a period of unprecedented change.First of all, the market has opened up to new players, who have a smart approach that is increasingly attentive to all aspects and benefits of digital. This has influenced the processes and brand identities of even the most established companies in the sector.

In this sense, the new challenges involve marketing and customer care professionals, two areas that are now more related than ever, especially when it comes to services such as electricity, gas, water, Internet, and telephony that have a real impact on the lives of customers.

At the same time, there have also been great changes in the sensitivity of public opinion (and therefore in the audience of potential customers). Today, the focus is on energy efficiency and environmental sustainability. Individual customers are becoming more and more informed: they demand clarity, transparency, and ease of dialog with the companies.

In a recent Bain & Company analysis, it was found that winning a new customer costs between 6 and 7 times more than retaining one. The real driving force behind this paradigm shift has been (and will continue to be) digital transformation, which has made these changes possible. And if were talking about digital today, this also means (and in some ways above all) that were talking about Cloud Computing.

Think about the possibilities of personalization and one-to-one dialog; it is thanks to digital and to cloud-based data-driven optics that this approach, can be put on track even for endless audiences.

For this reason, a company like Doxee, which has personalization and cloud-based services at the center of its business, has been included by CIOReview in its list of the 20 most promising technologies for the world of Utilities in 2018.

We conclude this section by reporting a quote from Isabelle Kocher, CEO of Engie, one of the 10 most important companies in the global Utilities and Energy sector: The word transition falls short of the change that we are witnessing: we are facing a real revolution.

We have also seen it above: the challenges facing the Utilities sector are many and they are complex. In addition to the challenges of digital transformation, there are also the following:

Added to this are cutting-edge themes such as the internet of things (IoT) and blockchain technologies. All of these trends will increasingly rely on high performing and carefully designed Cloud Computing services.

But we dont have to look too far into the future. According to the most updated estimates, the Utilities sector, as a whole, will invest about $4 billion in public cloud services in 2019 alone. And when there are such large investments, companies see even greater possible benefits. This is a certainty.

Now we will take a closer look at these advantages, which we will summarize in five points.

Cloud services are based on on-demand and pay-per-use optics. The consequence is that, by exploiting them, utility companies can contain both Capital Expenditures (CAPEX) and Operating Expenditures (OPEX).Moreover, this reduction is accompanied by an improvement in performance.

Another consequence of the move to Cloud Computing systems is the exponential increase in flexibility and scalability. This means lower investments, with less risk with the possibility to increase or decrease computing power or storage capacity when you need. To get the most out of this flexibility, the most suitable solutions could be Multi-Cloud or Hybrid Cloud.

GTM Research has estimated that, for Utilities companies data analysis investments will grow from $700 million in 2012 to about $3 billion in 2020, an expected increase of more than 400%. Again, these are large investments driven by even greater possibilities for economic return.

Analyzing a large amount of data means knowing as much as possible about your audience of users, segmenting them into clusters, to increase engagement and loyalty with targeted and tailored actions (lowering the churn rate, which we will return to in the next point). Collecting such an impressive amount of data, from an omnichannel point of view, Cloud Computing systems are essential.

Today, moreover, it is possible to go beyond segmentation and aim at individuals, thanks to personalization. This is a strategy that some of the most important companies in the sector, such as Enel or Engie, have already put on track, relying on the specialized services of a company like Doxee.

The effectiveness of addressing each person in a different way, based on their characteristics, is something that can be easily understood. Take this data into consideration:

In the previous point, we discussed the importance of collecting and analyzing big data, right up to the frontier of customization. We can push the limits a little further and put in place strategies for the analysis of data in real-time: this is what we mean beyond the technicalities with real-time reporting.

Real-time reporting, based on an efficient Cloud Computing architecture, will be one of the most powerful weapons for companies to get to know their users even better, to interact with them in the right time and in the right way, and to reduce the churn rate, or the rate of abandonment. This is one of the main problems of the sector, which has become more urgent than ever in the current open market.

According to the Customer Experience Impact Report, 89% of the users have turned to a competitor due to problems in the customer experience.

Thanks to Cloud Computing, the power of computing, analysis, storage, and collection of valuable data increases significantly. The natural consequence is a parallel surge in the importance of security systems. With the introduction of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), these aspects have become even more urgent.

Cloud system providers are well aware of this, which is why they are unbeatable, even in this respect. In fact, they have a capacity for updating and attention to threats on all possible fronts of both internal and local systems.

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The importance of Cloud Computing for the Utility Industry - Doxee

Global Cloud Computing in Education Market Analysis

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Global Cloud Computing in Education Market: Trends and Opportunities

Across the world, the cloud computing in education market is anticipated to gain a strong impetus due to the elevating adoption of the technology in higher education and K-12. For the forecast period, higher education is predicted to mark a larger share in the global market amongst other end users. The domination of this possible end user segment could continue until the end of the forecast period.

Since most end users prefer the services offered by platform as a service (PaaS) providers, this service model market is expected to gain traction over markets in the category. The important change in the cloud ecosystem is principally attributed to the implementation of PaaS. However, software as a service (SaaS) is foreseen to hold a significant percentage of share in the global cloud computing in education market.

Owing to the amplified number of security features offered at a reasonable price, the community cloud as a probable deployment type segment is foretold to grasp a marked share in the world cloud computing in education market.

Global Cloud Computing in Education Market: Regional Outlook

Specifically in the developed countries of Canada and the U.S., the demand for cloud computing in education is prognosticated to move levels higher as they look to ride on the elevating focus on production innovations. Most innovations in this field are judged to receive a strong push from the rigorous research and development activities performed in the cloud computing sector. As a result, North America is expected to leave no doubts in the minds of the research analysts for coming forth as a larger revenue holder in the global cloud computing in education market.

The Asia Pacific market is forecasted to be propelled by the shift toward cloud solutions for sophisticated services such as tracking, sharing, and collaborating sundry variants of a document. Much of this demand is expected to birth from end users such as universities and schools.

There could be a few challenges that the top regions of the cloud computing in education market could face, i.e. rigidly designed cloud-based systems and account management and data protection risks. Nevertheless, such constraints are estimated to lose their effect eventually with the advent of momentous opportunities such as developing potential markets, employment of adaptive cloud services, and application of cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

Global Cloud Computing in Education Market: Companies Mentioned

Among others, the sovereign brands operating in the worldwide cloud computing in education market could be Ellucian, Amazon Web Services, NetApp Inc., NEC Corporation, Microsoft Corporation, VMware Inc., IBM Corporation, Cisco System Inc., and Adobe System Inc. With the intention of popularizing their offerings at a global platform, the major vendors in the market are envisaged to take advantage of acquisitions and mergers and inauguration of novel products.

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Cloud Computing in Education Market: Competitive Landscape and Recent Industry Development Analysis 2017 - 2025 - Weekly Spy