As digital technologies shift away from linear evolution to exponential evolution, the need for cloud solutions is ever-growing. The recent past has been a stimulating growth period for cloud computing. The rising demand for next-generation technologies during COVID-19 alongside the proliferation of “work-from-anywhere” have tremendously impacted the cloud adoption among businesses across industry sectors. IT leaders are working to shift operations to the cloud to ensure business continuity and remote workforce’s convenience. This momentum will further pick up pace in 2024.
Many organizations accelerated their digital transformation journey and the dependency on cloud infrastructures continues to grow as they adjust to upcoming models. A recent study by Gartner forecasts the global public cloud market to surpass revenues worth US$ 480 billion by 2022-end. As digital technologies shift away from linear evolution to exponential evolution, the need for cloud solutions is ever-growing.
Top 7 Cloud Computing Trends in 2024
Most organizations globally are embracing the cloud-first mindset. As they continue to do so, new cloud trends are gaining traction in 2024.
Data and Application Modernization
Modernization’s true significance is in helping organizations build capabilities to scale and automate, which includes
- Establishing microservices and multi-tenanted architectures for replacing monolithic applications
- Re-imagining applications through an API-first approach
- Enabling auto scaling by containerization
What’s important for businesses is to note that too much time has been spent in shaping the applications landscape and from a technical or commercial perspective, opting for modern applications to replace them can be daunting. Therefore, modernization approaches in the foreseeable future will also include building integration layers for easy access to distributed applications.
AI in the Cloud
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the cloud share a covalent bond. AI powers the cloud whereas the cloud facilitates delivering AI solutions. In addition, cloud computing also enables democratizing artificial intelligence by exposing it to a larger consumer base. Combining the cloud with cloud AI empowers organizations to leverage the best of both cost-effectively. They can manage data as well as glean insights while establishing continuous virtual backup and recovery.
Security
Security investments are pegged to grow unabated, given the shifting mindset toward automating operations, ranging from orchestration to response. The systems and security tools offered by the cloud make it affordable for business of any size. This is primary because cloud service providers are focusing to ride on the economies of scale and invest more in security. From the implementation of SIEM systems and using logic applications for automating responses to carrying out continuous assessment, cloud computing will allow security specialists to focus on proactive threat identification instead of reactive mitigation techniques.
Serverless
Witnessing widespread adoption among organizations, serverless computing has come a long way. Currently, it is being given utmost importance among major players in the cloud industry, as it promises the ideal ‘pay-as-you-go’ service. This enables organizations to pay only for services they consume and scale invisibly based on their applications’ requirements without worrying about significant investment. It is also helping organizations eliminate back-end failures while offering safe sandboxes to implement the code. Moving forward, serverless computing in the cloud will play a major role to create high-end digital experiences for users.
Sustainability
Following environmental best practices for learning, measuring, and improving workloads in the cloud can enable organizations to cut down energy consumption. The new Sustainability Pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework helps organizations in doing so. Nearly 80% of the energy usage can be reduced with sustainability of the cloud vis-a-vis on-premises. This is primarily achieved through custom design of the data center, cooling and power efficiency, and higher server utilization.
Hybrid Cloud
Often lately, hybrid cloud has been the holy grail of technology vendors offering on-premises technologies. However, the public cloud vendors are providing a cloudlike experience on-premises. Organizations must rethink their approach to hybrid cloud and need to consider the degree of control they want to be responsible for. Allowing a public cloud vendor to handle the private cloud can result in losing control to some extent but promising consistent and unified private cloud experience. In addition, the end-customer will benefit from the hybrid cloud options, which provides consistency, offered by public cloud vendors. On the other hand, public cloud vendors will also see significant benefits, as it would serve them as another revenue stream.
Gaming
Leveraging the cloud in the gaming sector has driven the engagement as well as demand from multiplayers for games with different concepts. It also aids in removing existing barriers to the traditional platform. Gaming on the cloud further eliminates the requirement for storage space, let alone mitigating all the piracy issues, which in turn translates to reduced overall cost and increased sustainability.
New Cloud Computing Trends in 2024
In 2024, cloud computing is poised to witness several transformative trends reshaping the industry landscape.
- One prominent trend is the rise of edge computing, where computing resources are decentralized and brought closer to the data source, enabling real-time processing and reduced latency for applications such as IoT and autonomous vehicles.
- Additionally, with the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies within cloud platforms is expected to accelerate. This would enable advanced analytics, predictive insights, and automation capabilities for businesses across various sectors.
- Another emerging trend is the adoption of serverless computing, allowing developers to focus on code rather than infrastructure management, leading to increased agility and cost efficiency.
- Moreover, hybrid and multi-cloud architectures are gaining traction as organizations seek flexibility, scalability, and resilience by leveraging a combination of public, private, and edge cloud environments tailored to their specific needs.
Overall, these trends reflect the evolving nature of cloud computing, driving innovation, efficiency, and competitiveness in the digital era.
To Wind Up
One of the largest technological forays in recent years, cloud computing is now both a standard for cost savings and flexibility as well as a trend that drives innovation. With its continued adoption across industry sectors, there is little doubt that cloud computing is the future of business. In this vast digital landscape of myriad dynamic infrastructures, newer cloud technologies will continue to emerge in the near future.