Future of Cloud Computing – Year 2020 and Beyond

Catalyst behind Growth of Cloud

If we narrow down a few factors that acted as a catalyst for the cloud’s rapid growth, they would be ease of access, instant scalability and cost cutting. Among these few factors, the foremost aspect that instantly catches the eye of management is reduction in costs. Let’s briefly touch these benefits: –

Ease of Access

The physical form of modern organizations is rapidly diluting with rising influence of the cloud. All the organizational data resides over a central data center of a Cloud Service Provider (CSP), which can be accessed by employees round the clock from many device platforms. All you need to establish connectivity is an internet connection.

Employees execute their respective tasks over the Cloud Infrastructure and any changes to the data are accessible to other company stakeholders in real time. The ease of access available with the cloud make it a perfect fit for remote work scenarios, thus ensuring employee productivity, even in abnormal circumstances.

Also Read: The Capability of Cloud Powered Networking Technologies

Instant Scalability

Consider your CSP as a large repository of storage, computing and other resources that are accessible over the internet. As your organizational needs grow and shrink with business cycles, so can your cloud based solution. All this happens instantaneously and results in change of your usage fees, without affecting fixed costs.

Also Read: 8 Reasons: Why Cloud Computing For Small Business?

Cost Cutting

As competition is intense in today’s technology driven landscape, every organization is obsessed with reducing costs and maximizing efficiency. The cloud serves both organizational goals effectively. With the cloud, you don’t need on premise hardware, which results in saving both capital and operational expenses related to I.T hardware.

Areas Where Cloud is Creating an Impact

When more organizations started realizing the accompanying benefits of cloud computing, the adoption rates spiked exponentially. Let’s touch some of the sectors where the cloud is already creating an impact:-

Marketing Platforms

The functional area of marketing is highly dynamic and decision makers constantly need real time data to align their strategy. Before the cloud, compiling actionable data for marketing campaigns itself used to take up weeks and months. This would often result in the loss of an opportunity.

With all encompassing marketing solutions over the cloud, this is no more the case. Key marketing stats and metrics are being updated over the cloud in real time and decision makers can extract data with just a few clicks. Entire marketing campaigns are being designed and managed solely over the cloud.

Education Sector

The cloud has transformed the education sector and brought unprecedented ease. By leveraging the power of cloud, educational institutions can deliver distance learning programs very effectively. Students can access their learning resources over the cloud, without visiting the campus.

Further, students can also submit their assignments, quizzes and even exams online over the cloud. This makes education both affordable and much more accessible. Using the cloud, a university in England can offer distant learning courses to students in America.

Also Read: 14 Reasons You Should Use a Cloud Based Accounting Software

Healthcare Industry

The cloud has left a very positive impact on the healthcare industry. Medical records such as patient history, insurance coverage and treatment management are very sensitive and critical in nature. By moving patient records over the cloud, healthcare providers have added a whole new dimension of efficiency and ease.

Also Read: How Cloud Computing Can Bring Efficiency and Ease in Healthcare?

A patient’s treating physician can have real time access to a patient’s medical history, which can be very helpful in deciding the most suitable course of treatment. Medical data of millions of patients over the cloud can be analyzed to extract valuable insights about various diseases and how they responded to various medications.

Cloud Computing Works in Progress

Below are some key areas where the cloud is rapidly making inroads and transforming these industries:-

Software

Gone are the days when software had to be installed on each end point device. Enterprise software is rapidly becoming cloud native so that all the enterprise needs are met over the cloud infrastructure. This brings in both efficiency and ease of management at the organizational level.

Cyber Security

Over the cloud, cyber security is of paramount importance because organizational data resides with a third party. We are rapidly moving towards all encompassing cyber security suites that cater to all the facets of data security such as access, authentication, encryption, malware protection and much more.

Also Read: How to Balance Cloud Security and Productivity in a Migration?

Data Analysis

We live in the era of data as it has become a highly prized commodity. The future success of organizations will hinge around their capability of analyzing vast data and extracting valuable insights. The cloud offers immense capability of storing, processing and analyzing vast data for actionable business intelligence.

Conclusion

The cloud computing industry is far from over and it has many more avenues that have not yet been fully tapped. Organizations need to embrace the cloud with a view to bring about flexibility, efficiency and agility to their existing operations, which will ultimately culminate in the form of a competitive edge in the respective domain.