Cloud and cloud-centric operating models have grown to become integral components of the modern IT environment, and with the COVID-19 pandemic being the first crisis of the cloud era, all cloud promises – elastic consumption, agile development, and global reach – will be put to the test in the coming months.
“Cloud provides benefits such as flexibility, agility, reach and scalability; both in terms of being able to scale out quickly and scale down have become even more strategic and important to enterprises to adapt to changing business needs as we move forward towards a new normal under these pandemic impacted times,” says Daphne Chung, Research Director for Cloud Services and Software research at IDC Asia/Pacific.
In its annual Futurescape: Worldwide Cloud 2021 predictions, IDC adds that the benefits of the cloud have made the technology the most strategic and widely adopted technology amid the pandemic. From leveraging SaaS solutions that cover collaboration, productivity, and security point solutions, cloud solutions and services have been adopted to support remote working and innovation initiatives.
IDC believes cloud platforms (public/hosted/private and recently introduced LCaaS compute, storage, and network bundles from IT suppliers) are also playing critical roles in helping enterprises react to the crisis, deal with the slowdown, and enable operational resiliency.
Looking into the next few years, IDC has outlined several key cloud predictions that will impact the IT industry and both technology buyers and suppliers in Asia/Pacific.
These include:
Prediction #1: Through 2022, all enterprises will struggle with application modernisation and data integration throughout cloud silos. Around 20% will adopt well-connected cloud strategies to overcome these concerns.
Prediction #2: By 2023, enterprises will have allocated 20% of new cloud services spending to cloud solutions that meet specific industry and ecosystem data-sharing requirements for their vertical segment.
Prediction #3: By 2024, over a quarter of new workloads deployed on public clouds will have used purpose-built silicon and infrastructure components from providers to optimise use case–specific requirements.
