No signs of slowing down for cloud tech

By James Bromberger, VP cloud computing Akkodis

You might think cloud technology would at some point hit the ceiling. But no, we seem far from that point. There are no signs of slowing down for cloud tech.

The cloud continues to grow. Let me give you several reasons for that, while also trying to look a bit into the future of cloud and presenting my view on what might be the next level of innovation on the cloud platform.

Expanding even further

The cloud is expanding even further, mainly because cloud providers have been exceptionally good at mastering the art of economy of scale. As cloud adoption has grown, the hyperscalers have reaped the rewards coming from increasing volume, and they have shared that cost reduction with their customers. And for a good reason, because as cost goes down customers use more. That gives the economy of scale allowing cloud providers to lower the per unit price even more.

There seems to be no end in sight to that continuing cycle. It has become a self-supporting mechanism.

Faster and cheaper

At the same time, compute has become faster and cheaper, storage and networking as well, in fact everything in the cloud technology cycle. It seems that Moore’s Law is still in effect: the number of transistors and integrated circuit will double about every two years. And that doubling has generally corresponded to cost optimizations in the Cloud sphere.

But reducing cost is only one side of the matter. There are other factors that have shaped and continue to shape The Cloud.

For instance, new types of use cases are emerging. As an example, companies and organizations are increasingly activating the vast amounts of data they produce. Previously they had the data but were often unsure how to utilize it. Now, we are seeing an uplift in the use of analytics on large data, both structured and unstructured, in an effort to extract knowledge out of the data. As an example, looking at the energy market and trying to work on determining energy utilization and usage across a network, coming up with models that can predict how much power is likely to be produced and used under certain weather conditions.

Other data-intense cloud-based technologies and use cases are emerging, many of the centered around computer vision. Also, real-time translation is another fascinating and promising cloud-enabled technology.

New levels of compliance

Furthermore, cloud providers are continuously achieving higher levels of compliance against various governance requirements. As an example, we’re seeing special deployments being set up for governments, meeting their specific requirements for cyber security and data sovereignty. And as compliance itself evolves, cloud providers will continue to innovate to meet these higher requirements, to be in a position where their clients can use their services without risk. All this means we will continue to see, that larger and larger amounts of the technology operations of the businesses that we know and use and work in will move more and more workloads to the hyperscale and cloud providers and less and less over time in the bespoke local on-premises data centre or co-location facility.

From support to DevOps

As a side effect, as these systems become more crucial to operations, they require a higher level of care. To address this need, support is gradually transitioning to being DevOps operated. While traditional support is about having your digital service running at the lowest possible cost, now more and more critical workloads are better supported by a DevOps model. Such a model is obviously more costly. But on the other hand, it secures the outcome regarding cyber security, the efficiency, the fit-for-purpose of the workload to today’s requirements.  

Sustainability

Energy consumption is another aspect that has gained track in recent years. More and more companies and organizations have sustainability corporate sustainability goals, and they look at reducing the environmental footprint from their utilization of the cloud.

There are ways to do that, for instance moving from virtual machine based computing to event based computing or choosing more energy efficient CPUs. Equally important is having your whole cloud setup well maintained and well architected. If not, technical debt starts to creep in, and the setup risks missing out on the opportunities to become cheaper, faster, better and greener.

Harnessing cloud innovation

Akkodis is a versatile and well-respected service provider in the cloud tech space. And for us it is an obligation to stay at the forefront of new trends in the domain. That means continuously being in touch with our customers on how to harness cloud innovation for their specific purposes.

Internally we prioritize constantly bringing in fresh talent, and to mentor, nurture, and educate our cloud specialists. For many years we’ve invested time and effort in senior engineers mentoring junior engineers, and simultaneously finding inspiration in what young people fresh out of university can bring to the table.

That is the most crucial thing here: The Cloud continues to make promises, but you must have the talented engineers to be able to deliver on these promises. At Akkodis we have hundreds of those talented engineers, delivering and continuing to manage and optimize Cloud solutions for our clients.