Flux7 Blog

Cloud computing has upended the infrastructure and operations landscape. While early benefits — like the ability to minimize infrastructure costs through a pay-as-you-go model — still apply, as cloud providers have grown the maturity of their offerings, enterprises are finding more advanced benefits like extreme scalability and reduced time-to-market. These benefits continue to lure customers to the cloud with Forrester reporting that 65% of North American enterprises now rely on public cloud platforms. This number is up from 60% as reported Forrester last year, a number that in itself was five times the percentage of just five years prior.

Cloud technology is moving just as quickly as new customers flocking to it. Indeed, at the 2018 re:Invent alone, AWS announced 76 new products and features. With that speed of change it’s easy to lose sight of the forest through the trees. Enter Forrester’s newest insight, Predictions 2020: Cloud Computing to help you understand the trends that will, to use their words, “reshape the cloud battleground — again.” 

How will 2020 reshape the cloud landscape? Here are our three key highlights from Forrester’s Predictions 2020: Cloud Computing report.

• The market will continue to consolidate behind AWS, Azure, Google, IBM and Alibaba. Moreover, Forrester notes that with IBM’s recent Red Hat acquisition, the writing is on the wall that IBM will shift its focus to help enterprises use the Red Hat OpenShift development platform to modernize core business applications, regardless of cloud provider. This timing makes good sense as noted in this blog post, “Last year, Forrester predicted that enterprises would start modernizing core business apps with cloud computing in 2019, and that transformation has indeed taken off.”

• High performance computing (HPC) in the public cloud will continue to grow. As cloud providers make large, strategic investments in new instance types, build new hybrid offerings, and ink deals with HPC solution providers, historic reasons to keep HPC on site are dissolving. With new features and capacity, Forrester predicts HPC in the public cloud will grow in 2020, with analytics and AI innovation on top of HPC solutions, especially in the pharmaceutical and oil and gas industries.

• With breaches like Capital One’s top of mind at many organizations, security will remain a top priority. Forrester expects to see cloud providers accelerate new security services and predicts that M&A activity (like VMware’s acquisition of Carbon Black,) will only continue. More than just an IAM approach, however, Forrester indicates that security in 2020 must be more inclusive, including concerns such as cloud security gateways, threat intelligence, endpoint detection and more.

Read the full report today to learn more about these HPC, software modernization and cloud security insights and Forrester’s 2020 predictions for growth of the public cloud market; service meshes and serverless computing; alliances among hyperscale global public cloud leaders, and; why leading business application vendors will move to the hyperscale leaders. 

Written by Flux7 Labs

Flux7 is the only Sherpa on the DevOps journey that assesses, designs, and teaches while implementing a holistic solution for its enterprise customers, thus giving its clients the skills needed to manage and expand on the technology moving forward. Not a reseller or an MSP, Flux7 recommendations are 100% focused on customer requirements and creating the most efficient infrastructure possible that automates operations, streamlines and enhances development, and supports specific business goals.