In recent years, the cloud has become mainstream. It is now rare to find a company that is not using cloud services or not trying to build and optimize its own cloud strategy, and it is no longer unbelievable that the cloud could reach a 100% adoption rate very soon. However, the cloud market is still developing. As it matures and increases in scale, we encounter exciting new opportunities, as well as multiple challenges.
Cloud Market Today and Tomorrow
The cloud market is booming – this has been repeatedly emphasized by the majority of market researchers. Cloud adoption is making great progress and most enterprises use multiple cloud environments to try to combine private and public cloud options for storing data. Both large corporations and smaller firms now tend to run more and more of their workload in the cloud and have increased their cloud spending significantly.
The future also looks promising. Both IDC and Gartner, two respected research firms, have forecast solid growth for the public cloud services market. According to Gartner, it will boost by 16.5% from $175 billion in 2015 to $204 billion in 2016 and continue to grow in 2017. The fastest-growing segment will remain IaaS, projected to reach 22.4 billion in 2016, followed by PaaS and SaaS.
IDC expects worldwide spending on public cloud services to grow at a 19.4% compound annual growth rate from $70 billion in 2015 to $141 billion in 2019. This is about six times the rate of overall IT spending growth. Remarkably, spending on SaaS will account for two-thirds of all public cloud spending; however, worldwide spending on IaaS and PaaS will grow noticeably faster than that for SaaS.
The cloud is becoming more embedded in our day-to-day lives, and this tendency will only strengthen. In the near future, we can witness a rising number of new cloud infrastructure solutions and further cloud market growth. Many new cloud service providers are likely to emerge and join such reputable cloud computing leaders as Amazon, Microsoft, Cisco, HPE, IBM, and Salesforce.
Opportunities and Challenges
The cloud market presents a huge opportunity for both businesses and social innovation. A new survey conducted by Clutch shows that the majority of enterprises in the U.S. plan to raise their annual spending on cloud computing by up to 50% in 2016 to increase business efficiency, decrease time to market, improve business models, and deliver products and services to customers in new ways.
Cloud-based services offer a wide range of business benefits, such as availability, agility, scalability, mobility, automation, and cost efficiency, that were unimaginable even just a few years ago. They allow every company, regardless of its size, to access the functionalities it needs to overcome many difficulties connected to traditional IT resources, such as packaged software.
However, the rapid growth of the cloud market predicted by many experts brings us not only opportunities, but many challenges. In the past few years, cloud security has been considered the main cloud challenge, with such cloud computing threats as data breaches and data loss, broken authentication, hacked interfaces, and account hijacking.
In 2016, however, the trend has changed. According to the RightScale 2016 State of the Cloud Report, security is no longer the top challenge for the cloud. As more and more companies rely on cloud services, the need for expertise has increased dramatically, and a lack of resources and additionally trained IT and development staff has become the largest concern.
Auriga’s Cloud Projects
For several years, Auriga’s engineers have been participating in complex cloud projects. We have significant experience in building, deploying, and managing applications using various cloud computing platforms, such as the well-known Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
One of the latest solutions Auriga has worked on is a cloud computing resources management system. We have developed an application that enables the preparation, management, and publishing of the company’s computing resources for internal customers. This was a big international project designed to monitor tens of thousands of servers and network devices and hundreds of thousands of users worldwide.
Another project involved the development of a scalable image retrieval system, where AWS, including its central part, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), was implemented to create services for automatic scaling of the system.
Elena Baranova, Auriga’s Director of Engineering, comments:
Today, the cloud plays a big role in nearly everything from checking emails to running businesses. Closely related to concepts such as Big Data and the Internet of Things, cloud computing appears to be one of the main trends influencing the future.
Taking into consideration that the cloud is a rapidly changing field, it is highly important to keep abreast of the latest technologies and choose an experienced partner for your cloud projects.
Auriga’s expertise represents a unique combination of extensive embedded software development experience and advanced knowledge of mobile and cloud technologies. This enables us to deliver sophisticated solutions and consistent value to our customers.
