Cloud Automation: What it Means for Your Enterprise in 2021?

Cloud has proven to be a future-ready technology and showed how central it is to the world’s organizations as they navigated the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s not surprising that about 50% of all corporate data is stored in the cloud, as of 2021. As cloud platforms gain increasing popularity and a surge in demand for their services, startups and enterprises have a unique opportunity to leverage the cloud to grow to the next level.

“According to the latest forecast from Gartner, Inc. the global end-user spending on public cloud services is expected to grow 23.1% in 2021 to total $332.3 billion, up from $270 billion in 2020.”

More and more startups, SMBs, and enterprises seem to be adopting cloud computing, and for good reason. However, one of the top priorities of organizations with cloud use is the cost. With self-service IT, automation, and multi-cloud technology, employing cloud as a service can be significantly cost-effective. These technologies enable companies to create new applications and services in a better, easier, and faster way.

That said, let’s dive into how cloud is changing, its challenges, use cases, and benefits for businesses.

Key Challenges For Cloud in the Near Term

Cloud platforms are constantly working to address a number of key challenges:

• Industry-optimized cloud

The value proposition for cloud providers is their ability to provide tailored services to meet your needs. For instance, businesses in healthcare, finance, airlines, and automotive face stricter regulations and compliance policies, limiting their ability to adopt traditional cloud services. With the latest cloud technologies like multi-cloud and hybrid cloud, businesses can leverage cloud capabilities to comply with their industries’ new security and regulatory requirements.

• Migration of workloads

Shifting to a cloud platform can be time-intensive and overall challenging, if not done the right way. With more businesses turning to cloud providers, a big challenge for companies is the costs associated with migration. This depends on various factors including your cloud provider’s migration policies, technical support, and your workload.

• Complex deployment and operational challenges

The battle for a market position has led to companies opting for cloud providers that often don’t meet their demands. Poor automation capabilities and customer support by cloud managed services mean complex deployment and operational challenges for enterprises.

How Are Businesses Using the New Cloud Post-Pandemic?

The “new normal” is all about ensuring an agile engineering approach and cloud infrastructure while focusing on business goals like higher efficiency, improved product quality, and reduced costs. Many companies are adopting cloud computing the new way — leveraging automation, self-service IT, and hybrid models. Here are some of the use cases of cloud in the post-pandemic world:

• Infrastructure provisioning

A growing cloud trend is the adoption of user self-provisioning, also known as cloud self-service, wherein a customer buys resources from a cloud provider through a portal or web application. The user then has to create a user account, pay for resources, and quickly configure the system as per their needs within hours, if not minutes. These applications or software support end-to-end infrastructure provisioning — from orchestration to deployment — to automatically control the installation, configuration, and management of cloud services.

• Application deployment

Containerization in the cloud is all the rage today. The core idea is to package an application and all of its dependencies in a compact, uniform set of libraries and APIs. Many cloud providers offer container applications as part of their services and can be easily deployed by DevOps and DevSecOps directly on top of the cloud application layer. So, businesses can reduce manual tasks, save costs and time if they adopt containerization in the cloud.

“Gartner predicts that 70% of global organizations will run more than two containerized applications in production by 2023, up from less than 20% in 2019.”

• Multi-cloud management

Businesses in segments like healthcare, automotive, airlines, and manufacturing have highly specific requirements with different processes. With more complex and intensive apps being developed in these industries, these segments have seen a major change wherein organizations are increasingly developing cloud-native apps with little to no architecture dependence on a single cloud provider. Cloud automation offers new ways to collate, visualize, store, and analyze data across providers as more businesses adopt the multi-cloud model.

“Even though most organizations shift from on-premises to multi-vendor deployments in multiple stages, about 93% of enterprises have built up to a multi-cloud strategy.”

Benefits of Adopting Multi-Cloud & Hybrid Cloud

• Faster go-to-market

A key motivating point for businesses to adopt hybrid cloud is that it offers a faster go-to-market without losing out on efficiency, speed, and regulatory compliance. 87% of companies have already implemented hybrid cloud strategies and the hybrid cloud market is predicted with a growth rate of 17% to reach almost $100 billion by 2023, up from $44.6 billion in 2018.

• Lower risks and errors

Having a hybrid or multi-cloud environment helps you avoid vendor lock-in, and so it’s easier to migrate workloads when needed. Additionally, hybrid cloud computing offers higher control over data and better security to reduce vulnerabilities and the risk of data exposure. Besides, you can also standardize redundant cloud storage, which is a crucial part of disaster recovery and data insurance.

• Upgraded engineering and infrastructure

Hybrid cloud has accelerated the implementation of high-demand areas such as automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and security to ensure better, efficient workflows. Building complex applications for specific vertical industry and regulatory policies is now easier with the cloud as it provides an ecosystem of modern engineering and infrastructure. Creating new business models, developing the SDLC, collaborating cross-functionally are functions that are now made seamless with the adoption of multi-cloud model.

• Better security and compliance

Hybrid cloud model offers a sweet balance between the security of a private cloud and the power and services of a public cloud. This means, while you can access services from the public cloud like analytics, applications, etc, extensive encryption is applied to your data stored in a private cloud environment making it as secure as possible. Moreover, hybrid cloud solutions ensure compliance with data security and privacy regulations like HIPPA, GDPR, and the PCI DSS.

• Increased scalability and lower costs

A key sticking point for businesses when investing in technology is choosing the right platform that’s not just scalable but also is a cost-efficient option. With a hybrid cloud, organizations can easily scale their operations as needed and avoid resource expenditures, management requirements, and technical overhead. Bottom line is you can use as many or as few servers depending on your needs when using the hybrid cloud model.

Getting Started with Adopting Hybrid Cloud

With an increasing demand for complex infrastructures and use cases, it’s imperative for businesses to adopt a more scalable and efficient cloud technology the empowers their teams to collaborate, build, and release better products faster. Understanding hybrid cloud and multi-cloud computing enable you to improve infrastructure, strengthen security, compliance, and reduce IT spendings. If you want to learn more about how exactly you can integrate the cloud into your environment, check out our other blogs here.