Cloud Hosting

From a small revolution at first, cloud computing has in recent years evolved into a key strategic development driver not only for businesses but also for governments in short, for society at large. Whether with the launch of new players or the emergence of the first open source cloud platform, the past decade has been marked by outstanding innovations that have forever transformed the use of IT, both by and for businesses. The core of these innovations has been data, the new black gold without which future innovations would be compromised.

The new year 2020 heralds the start of a new era in which businesses intend to play a more instrumental role in the cloud offering at hand, including business models, in order to always make the most of their data. Even though it is difficult if not impossible to imagine what the next decade will be like, we can, however, anticipate some trends for 2020:

Hybrid cloud willcontinue to appeal to businesses

Business appetite for hybrid cloud has grown significantly in 2019. The challenges faced by businesses in terms of new skills, new application needs, legacy IT management etc. are constantly increasing as businesses realize that cloud computing is no panacea.

What is at stake is the significant cost associated with the extensive use of public cloud services and the ever more critical need for data control and security. Against this backdrop, businesses are turning away from exclusive public cloud offerings to move part of their data back to a private cloud.

On the other hand, they are abandoning on-premises cloud computing in favor of a hosted private cloud service that combines the best of both worlds greater cost control and a higher level of security, all with the elasticity and scalability of the cloud.

According to the Nutanix Cloud Enterprise Index, 92% of IT decision makers say this type of infrastructure best meets their needs.

and prefigures the advent ofmulti-cloud

Following in the footsteps of hybrid cloud but going one step further, there comes multi-cloud a combination of cloud environments ranging from on-premises cloud to hosted private cloud to public cloud, each dedicated to different use cases.

Given that no single cloud today can competitively provide for all solutions, the most mature businesses find in multi-cloud the promise of excellence selecting the best solutions from the entire cloud offering available to build a single application environment, in which all components are interdependent.

A business can choose to host its database with one provider, turn to another provider for its compute needs, store its data in yet another location, and orchestrate everything in a multi-cloud architecture.

As applications become less and less monolithic and their components communicate in an increasingly standardized way, it is a safe bet that multi-cloud has a bright future ahead of it.

Increasedinvestment will be made in orchestration and monitoring

While 2019 saw a decline in cloud budgets due to the ongoing consolidation, 2020 is expected to see investment pick up, increasing at a rate of 6.9% per year to $90.9billion by 2023 according to IDC forecasts in both public and private cloud. Initially seen as peripheral solutions, automation capabilities were the first to develop with the rise of containerization, providing simpler and faster portability.

Now has come the time for orchestration capabilities, which are at the heart of business concerns in order to better control traffic and align costs with actual needs and usage. First of all, Kubernetes is becoming the default orchestration technology. The aim here is to have applications that are capable of communicating natively and requesting resources in real time, deploying volumes and orchestrating everything based on application needs, the current contract and/or the parameters provided by the operator.

On the private cloud side, investment associated with data monitoring and observability capabilities will increase, allowing a more detailed understanding of infrastructure activity, in particular thanks to Machine Learning and AI applications.

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Security willremain a strategic issue

Previously, data security solutions focused on storage or networking capabilities. For example, if you wanted to store encryption keys securely, you had to rely on an HSM (Hardware Security Module), a monolithic solution that was poorly aligned with the cloud concept.

The ability to secure data in use, called Confidential Computing, is a big leap forward. More processors will embed this capability, which will therefore be increasingly available in infrastructures.

OVHcloud was one of the first to offer bare-metal offerings integrating and providing APIs to lease servers with this Confidential Computing capability built in. For instance, we already have partners who use such servers to offer key management features.

These servers, therefore, now make it possible to store and run all or part of software programs that require end-to-end security, thus greatly improving the security of data encryption and, in turn, of entire systems. Data encryption will be more readily available, whether for data in transit or at rest, to enhance data security.

Locally-based cloudservices will be increasingly in demand for legal reasons

With the introduction of data protection regulations and increased public awareness of this issue, businesses have realized the strategic nature of data sovereignty for themselves.

The issue of the legal framework for data goes beyond the scope of cloud providers alone and also affects businesses that use cloud solutions. Local initiatives are multiplying to set the rules for a trusted cloud, which meets everyones expectations in terms of data sovereignty.

Taking as example the recent French-German Gaia-X project, it would not be surprising that in 2020, private as well as public organizations were to favor their regional ecosystem face to the American-Chinese duopoly. We should see the development of new collaborative projects allowing the implementation of more local alternatives, made possible by a collective awareness by European vendors of their ability to provide a relevant cloud offering.

Many other topics could have been addressed here, such as open source, blockchain, AI and machine learning, but also applications related to smart cities, autonomous cars and connected health.

These technologies and fields of application involve the storage, exchange and processing of a large sometimes quite large amount of data, and are still in their infancy. In any case, one thing is for sure; society is evolving and cloud computing will continue to evolve as well, in order to better support it.

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Which [r]evolution to expect for cloud computing in 2020? - Data Economy