Recently, the views of our enterprise clients has change from seeing cloud as a risk to seeing it as either risk-neutral or cutting both cost and risk. Shaping Tomorrow went cloud-based in 2013 with similar concerns. So far, we have reduced risk and space requirements, lowered costs and substantially improved resilience. Here is what Athena, our robot, thinks the future holds for cloud computing.
What is changing?
Enterprise
Forrester predicts strong growth across all segments of the public cloud market, which it projects will be worth $191 billion by 2020.
92 percent of all workloads will be processed in the cloud by 2020.
Cloud traffic will rise 3.7-fold up from 3.9 zettabytes per year in 2015 to 14.1ZB per year by 2020.
Cloud platform holders, providing storage and easy access as well as cloud processing power and tools for basic image processing are expected to play a major role in the EO data market in the coming decade.
SaaS continues to account for the majority of enterprise spending on cloud, taking $36 billion (62 percent) out of a total public cloud market of $58 billion in 2013.
2016 was a defining year for cloud and nearly half of large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017.
2017 is going to be less about the cloud and all about machine learning.
Cloud environments are going to remain predominantly hybrid in the coming years.
2017 will mark more decentralization of KM because of the growth of the cloud inside the manufacturing enterprise.
At least 30% of service-oriented businesses will move the majority of their ERP applications to the cloud by 2018.
By 2017, 70 percent of organizations adopting hybrid ERP will fail to improve cost-benefit outcomes unless their cloud applications provide differentiating functionality.
By 2018, more than half of enterprise IT spending will be on third-platform tech, solutions, and services (mobile, cloud, etc.).
Cloud services was namechecked as the number one area IT decision makers expect to see an increase in budget for during 2017.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE's) public cloud market will grow to $75m in 2017.
In 2017, cognitive solutions delivered via the cloud will continue to drive new experiences and transform whole industries.
Forbes predicts cloud providers will be taking advantage of machine learning to help companies organize and use their unstructured data.
The adoption of Hybrid Cloud Storage is expected to accelerate rapidly over the next year.
Public-cloud spending alone will grow to $522 billion in 2026.
2017 will mark more decentralization of KM because of the growth of the cloud inside the manufacturing enterprise.
By 2018, 25% of corporate data traffic will flow directly from mobile devices to the cloud.
Healthcare cloud adoption is expected to continue to grow over the next few years especially in disaster recovery and storage.
By 2018, 85% of enterprises will commit to a multi-cloud architecture model and by 2020 over 70% of cloud service provider revenues will be mediated by channel partners / brokers.
By 2018, at least 30 percent of service-centric companies will move the majority of their ERP applications to the cloud.
By 2018, the number of industry collaborative clouds will triple to more than 450.
Strategies
Amazon is gunning for cloud services while Apple is betting it will continue to gather momentum with new hardware and expanding its online services like Apple Music.
Cities
50% of cars will be connected to the cloud and as many as 10 million self-driving vehicles will be on the road by 2020.
Next year, many cities will begin to address the policy changes needed to be able to move to the cloud.
Technologies
Optical disks with petabit capacity will change the efficiency and productivity of cloud services and data centers and disrupt the global storage market.
The confluence of cloud environments and applications are going to rewrite the rules for IT in 2016.
A robotics-as-a-service model (encompassing AI, cloud and in some cases IoT) will develop globally over the next five years.
In 2017, new cognitive capabilities will accelerate the transformation of the cloud's perceived security vulnerabilities into a strength.
By 2020, 60% of robots will depend on cloud-based software to define new skills, cognitive capabilities, and application programs.
Cloud apps will drive 90% of total mobile data traffic by 2019.