Let’s rewind 2020 for a bit. You will find that the slow dread of a virus originating in a faraway land turned into an existential threat almost overnight with most countries going into lockdown. And imagine just where we would be if we did not have technology to connect, back us up and maintain essential services in a high crisis environment.
The graph between the changes was a sharp peak and if you are responsible for handling business – you should have planned for it even as you hoped that it would never come to pass. But a lot of businesses didn’t. And 2020 has been brutal in separating the wheat from the chaff – the only businesses that survived and thrived are the ones who had planned for long-term resilience (which of course included planning for massive data center outages and security breaches) or, at least were able to pivot quickly from set infrastructure processes and break inertia.
With the entire year being a ‘rub nose to ground’ lesson in the importance of building resilient, agile, responsive and mobile infrastructures, most businesses are looking for major improvements and/ or course correction in infusing digital transformation and cloud computing into the backbone of their businesses. 32% of total enterprise IT budgets will be allocated to cloud computing in 2021, up from 30% in 2018.
With all that in mind, here are our top predictions for enterprise infrastructure 2021:
Hyperscale public cloud market will return – with a bang
- It’s a testament to the power of hyperscalers that spending barely plummeted even during the course of the pandemic. Enterprises’ average cloud spending was $73.8M in 2020. This is expected to increase manifold in 2021.
- According to Forrester and considering the cloud adoption trend, the global public cloud infrastructure market will grow at a fairly astounding 35% to $120 billion in 2021.
- Alibaba is breathing down the necks of AWS and Microsoft Azure and is expected to reach the third highest revenue spot globally.
- Switch to public cloud is more or less a given for financial services, government/non-profit and manufacturing enterprises. Most even expect to use a single public cloud platform due to security and privacy concerns.
Serverless and containers are the current cloud computing trends and will drive high demand for cloud-native tech
- Cloud will form the backbone of enterprise business strategies in future and 92% of businesses agree that every aspect of enterprise from infrastructure and applications to data analytics will depend on cloud.
- Migration split of cloud-based applications is now at 54% for on-premise to cloud and 46% purpose-built for the cloud.
- From 20% of developers using container and serverless functions to build/ modernize apps in pre-Corona times, the numbers are expected to surge to 30% by end of 2021. The ripple effect will be a huge demand spike in multi-cloud container development platforms and public-cloud container/serverless services.
Enterprise software is dominating all cloud migration plans for 2021
- An increasing number of different aspects of enterprise operations and maintenance are coming under the ambit of cloud. The cloud migration plans of nearly 17% of enterprises feature a range of business applications being facilitated by cloud, such as, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Human Resource Management (HRM) and more.
- Given the likelihood of prevalence of remote work, 16% of enterprises are also planning to migrate their collaboration and communication solutions to the cloud in 2021.
- Other considerations and needs, such as, the efficiency and business relevance promised by cloud-based Business Intelligence (BI), Data Warehouse (DW) and Data Analytics systems are pushing another 15% of enterprises towards cloud migration.
As storage and operations, move to cloud – so does recovery
- COVID-19 showed us just how grave a data center outage can be. Most enterprises have learnt their lesson and focused attention on building highly resilient infrastructures.
- Many companies balked at storing protected data and workloads in the public cloud before 2020. Gartner now estimates that as much as a fifth of all enterprises will shift DR operations to the public cloud permanently.
Distributed cloud is likely to gain more of a foothold in enterprises as data privacy and security challenges remain a challenge in taking full advantage of public cloud resources.
- 42% of large-scale enterprises admit that they understand the incredible benefits of adopting a public multi-cloud strategy but remain wary of the perceived lack of data privacy and security.
- As governance and compliance is much more complicated for large-scale enterprises to manage across public multi-cloud based infrastructure, nearly 39% of large-scale enterprises admit facing compliance problems along with 23% of smaller enterprises.
Cloud Security Posture Management will come into focus
- As threats rise exponentially, so do highly advanced security and data protection. Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) will be a central focus for Enterprise Security Solutions going forward as it will help businesses automate cloud security management across the diverse cloud infrastructure.
- Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) will also allow companies to sort of bring all possible misconfigurations in one basket as diverse areas of the enterprise make use of Cloud Migration Solutions and are added to the cloud. This will allow for better oversight and allow businesses to comply with regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA with relative ease.
Benefits of using CSPM
Cloud Security Posture Management brings a host of granular configurations and features for businesses to really delve deeper into finding the fault lines in building a truly secure environment and addressing them as quickly as possible. The benefits of Cloud Security Posture Management include:
- Figuring out misconfigured network connectivity
- Evaluating data risk and identifying liberal account permissions
- With the entire security framework of organizations veering towards using identity as a building block rather than traditional security perimeters, continuous monitoring of the cloud environment to detect policy violations becomes even more critical and easily managed through Cloud Security Posture Management
- CSPM is also equipped with advanced features such as automatic detection and remedying of misconfigurations in the network
- Cloud Security Posture Management ensures up-to-date compliance with common standards to adhere to industry best practices
