Just how healthy is our cloud environment? Is cloud adoption and growth going the way it was predicted over the last few years or has it stagnated or dropped off?

I have been doing a little scratching around the surface, had a look at some of the research companies and spoken to a number of commercial cloud operators to find out a little about the health of cloud market today.

Back in 2009, I predicted that Cloud Computing was getting ready to take flight and advised the audience to ‘watch this space’. The ‘Cloud’ is not a technology or tactical direction instead, one of a strategic direction.

Major global cloud operators such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft over the past number of years have reported steady growth with huge gains over 2017. They all report very strong upward curves and predict this will going through 2018 and on for the short term with no reason to slowdown in the foreseeable future. Microsoft doubled its revenue during the 2017 fiscal period.

So, why are we seeing such rapid and exponential growth with colocation/cloud? There are a number of factors to be considered and are divided between;

• physical infrastructure
• cost of real estate
• management and maintenance
• network bandwidth and connectivity
• increase in offered services maturity and diversity
• security
• scalability to mention a few

The development and increase of these services have steadily been rising with one major research company stating that Cloud Services were 7% of the total market in 2010 and are predicted to rise 30% more by 2020. Two years away and I believe will roll right through that upper mark.

We are seeing a transformation with offered services such as;

• IaaS
• SaaS
• PaaS
• Original basic managed services being replaced with wholesale colocation
• Connectivity-centric colocation
• Automated infrastructure
• Complex managed/hybrid cloud
• All Flash Storage appliance
• Container architecture
• Storage as a service
• Data protection as a service
• Object storage as a service and so forth

The Cloud provider noted that Cloud has been delivering data storage connected to AI, Machine Learning, and data scrapping applications, which the Cloud then harvests into useful and purposeful business opportunities. The greater the development is in network connectivity, the more viable it’s flexibility and adaptability will makes of these offerings.

Clients can access large and complex amounts of data remotely without the drag of low bandwidth, knowing the data will be secure in a state of fully redundant and secure facility. A lot of smaller organisations, in particular, take advantage of the reducing cost and overhead of having their compute environment in-house. Yet it’s not just the small organisations taking advantage of the exploding cloud market, we have been seeing major corporations adopting this approach in recent years.

Is the cloud healthy? It certainly is!

Keen to know what more can it be done within the Cloud Environment? Join 500 senior executives and hear from experts like our co-founder at the World’s first ever event for Data Center, Cloud and Connectivity buyers – the Global Selection Convention 2018, organised by W.Media.