Author, Dimitri Dizna
CEO, BINARC
2021 was an important year for the cloud computing industry. It proved to be a strong period not only for the big three public cloud providers but also for several other players looking to take advantage of the increasing demand for the cloud.
Over the year, enterprises have continued to embrace multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies. As a result of the COVID-19 restrictions, we have seen a higher-than-expected cloud usage. As the pandemic affected businesses of all sizes, the cloud has enabled them to transition to remote work and move forward with their digital transformation strategies. Trying to ease migration to the cloud, providers have expanded their capabilities.
Microsoft
During the Microsoft Ignite conference, an event for Microsoft Partners, Developers and IT professionals, the tech giant unveiled its exhaustive set of resources developed to power metaverses as well as enhanced capabilities covering databases, AI, developer tools, security, and other solutions that are part of the Azure cloud platform.
Microsoft has announced new cloud environments for several industries in Dynamics 365 Commerce. Microsoft started this year with two industry clouds: Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and Microsoft Cloud for Retail. While at the Fall Ignite event, it announced the addition of another three industries to the program: finance, manufacturing, and nonprofit.
In 2021, BINARC has demonstrated that they are proficient at delivering Microsoft solutions. BINARC’s team of skilled, certified Microsoft specialists has helped manage, monitor, and maximize the Microsoft deployments of their customers while allowing them to focus on innovation. From strategic planning to production and beyond, BINARC has been there every step of the way—managing solutions and ensuring you get the full benefit of your Microsoft investment.
As a trusted Microsoft partner, they have been relied upon to deliver Microsoft’s products and to help their clients get more out of their Cloud journey. Headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, BINARC provides various services such as IT assessments, Microsoft Security Solutions, Microsoft Modernization Solutions, and Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) to organizations across a wide range of sectors, both public and private. BINARC integrates expert knowledge and technical expertise with Microsoft solutions to help organizations leverage the strength of enterprise-level protection and diminish the risk of cyber-attacks.
AWS in Transition
AWS's first major public moment took place at the end of November during the AWS re: Invent 2021 conference. AWS announced several new technologies at the event, including a Private 5G, Cloud-WAN, and new processor services.
Google Cloud
During the annual flagship event, Google has revealed a series of innovations. that span the company’s open cloud infrastructure, data cloud, collaboration, and cybersecurity technology. To assist businesses with their cloud deployments, Google announced Google Distributed Cloud, a fully managed hardware and software architecture. These solutions are primarily designed for customers with unique data sovereignty, latency, or local data-processing requirements. The latest options announced are Google Distributed Cloud Edge and Google Distributed Cloud Hosted. Both solutions are built on Anthos, an open-sourced platform that enables customers to deploy and manage Kubernetes workloads across different environments.
Competition Extends Beyond the Big 3
Even though the cloud industry is dominated by AWS, MS Azure, and Google Cloud in terms of revenue and market share, the year 2021 pointed out that there are other players capable of meeting user demands.
VMware vRealize Automation 8.4 Enhances Multi-Cloud Management
VMware has released update vRealize Automation 8.4 for improved multi-cloud management. The 8.4 release encloses many new features and updates, such as improved capabilities to sustain modern self-service multi-cloud infrastructures. In addition, VMware has also presented tighter integration with open-source innovations and cutting-edge multi-cloud provisioning and governance across Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and VMware Cloud. In 2021, BINARC helped customers assess and migrate VMWare infrastructure to Microsoft Azure.
Cloudreach Developed Smart Migration for Automated Cloud Migration
Cloudreach has launched a new service, Smart Migration. This solution aims to help companies migrate to the cloud with greater ease, speed, and trust. Smart Migration provides enterprise cloud transformation through data-driven automation to accelerate the modernization journey and make it more cost-efficient.
Cloud trends for 2022 and beyond
As we can see, the cloud usage continues to extend. In 2022, besides its ease of use, it is expected to concentrate on portability and connectivity, curbing the cost of these elastic solutions and rebalancing cloud versus on-prem workloads. Here are some outlooks on where cloud services are headed and what is anticipated to change in 2022.
A Transition to Multi-Cloud Strategies
With the enhanced acceptance of cloud computing as the central component of today’s IT infrastructures, businesses will move away from choosing a single cloud for all their cloud requirements. Despite the increased complexity of operating different workloads in different clouds, enterprises feel uneasy about putting all their eggs in the proverbial basket. Thus, organizations will choose a multi-cloud model that enables them to select the cloud solution that is best suited to their own application environments, availability requirements, and business needs.
Moving forward into 2022, we expect to see businesses continue showing a preference for hybrid or multi-cloud setups. Presently, according to the Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report, 93 percent of organizations hold a multi-cloud model, while 87% carry a hybrid cloud approach. These figures are expected to grow in 2022. BINARC strives to be in the avant-garde of the cloud industry trends and will embrace the multi-cloud model for its customers in 2022.
The first public cloud vendor offers its services on another public cloud
In 2022 we will most likely witness the first public cloud vendor offer its services on another public cloud. As a result, a race to disaggregate the most valuable capabilities from the overall service will be triggered. These capabilities could include numerous services from analytics to databases and AI/ML frameworks such as natural language processing. The result will accelerate the commoditization trend of cloud infrastructure.
Containerization
Over the last twenty years, we have witnessed a rising trend in the virtualization of physical IT infrastructure. However, with the increasing need to produce applications ready for cloud, containers came in handy. Based on the finding of a Gartner news report, containers have become widespread as they proved to be an effective instrument in addressing several crucial concerns of application developers, such as the demand for quicker delivery, agility, portability, modernization, and life cycle management. According to the same report, over 75% of global organizations will use containers in development.
Cloud computing meets edge computing
Today we notice everything around us getting connected to the cloud, and we are fetching massive data (structured and unstructured) from thousands of devices. All this data needs to be processed to obtain some meaningful insight. Edge computing proved to be useful in managing the load distribution.
Companies are now adopting cloud-native technologies in public, private, and hybrid cloud environments with far more ease. Businesses will convey increasing interest in getting cloud-native apps to the edge in the upcoming year, and this movement will bring enhanced portability and agility. Industry leaders in edge software (Red Hat and SUSE/Rancher Labs) and edge hardware (Intel and Nvidia) will need to ramp up efforts to sustain the transition of cloud-native apps to the edge to attain a better standardization.
The global roll-out of 5G technology, IoT, analytics can supercharge this development, increasing the demand for cloud-to-edge applications.
Numerous cloud providers have begun to divert their workloads to intelligent-edge platforms. – like HP, Nvidia, Microsoft, and IBM – organizations that have made considerable investments in the merger of Edge, 5G, and AI. Gartner anticipates that three-quarters of the data generated by organizations will be developed and managed outside of a centralized cloud by the year 2025,
Conclusion
Cloud adoption is not just a trend; it is here to stay. With the increasing technology adoption, organizations will have to design and strategize for their cloud strategy as one of their main pillars of the technology roadmap.
BINARC is a Microsoft Certified Partner that can optimize your IT landscape and various lines of business. With articles and blogs like this one, BINARC, will continue to keep its customers updated on technologies that can optimize their operations. For more information, please visit our website or schedule a free consultation.