Enterprise Cloud Computing Trends in 2016

Enterprise technology development keeps rising, and this year’s forecast explains how most of it will be wrapped in the cloud. In fact, David Linthicum from InfoWorld recently suggested it was time to retire the phase “cloud computing” and simply say “computing” – that’s how essential cloud has become.

The worldwide expansion of cloud IT infrastructure sales is a key indicator of how today’s enterprises see cloud computing as the channel for growth and expansion in a global digital economy. Enterprise cloud offers many benefits to an organization, including better speed, smooth performance, efficient utilization of IT resources, reduced IT infrastructure and operational costs, and increased capacity to handle peaks in demand for IT resources, like Web apps and services.

At the same time, cloud computing provides a safer computing environment within a company, with the use of virtual servers that decrease the threat of an onsite attack. It also provides the capacity for flexible data security policies, where security decisions can be made based on the role of a user within the company, the current access location, the type of accessed data or applications, and the type of device being used.

According to the RightScale 2016 State of the Cloud Report, in 2016, the overall theme is that hybrid cloud adoption is rising as both cloud users and cloud providers mature. Also, here are several other key findings from the report that show us how enterprise cloud computing is going to advance in 2016:

• Hybrid cloud adoption grew significantly – Private cloud adoption increased from 63 percent to 77 percent, driving hybrid cloud adoption up from 58 percent to 71 percent year-over-year
• More enterprise workloads shift to cloud, especially private cloud – 17 percent of enterprises now have more than 1,000 VMs in public cloud, up from 13 percent in 2015. Also, private cloud showed even stronger growth with 31 percent of enterprises running more than 1,000 VMs, up from 22 percent in 2015
• AWS continues to lead in public cloud adoption – Overall, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is used by 57 percent of respondents, flat from last year. Enterprise adoption of AWS grew from 50 percent to 56 percent while adoption by smaller businesses fell slightly from 61 percent to 58 percent. At the same time, Azure IaaS grows strongly from 12 percent to 17 percent adoption, while Azure PaaS grows from 9 percent to 13 percent
• Security is no longer the top cloud challenge – Lack of resources and expertise is now the number one cloud challenge (cited by 32 percent), surpassing security (cited by 29 percent).
• DevOps grows and Docker is spreading, especially in the enterprise – Overall, DevOps adoption rises from 66 to 74 percent, with enterprises reaching 81 percent. Also, Docker adoption more than doubles to 27 percent vs. 13 percent in 2015; and another 35 percent have plans to use Docker.

2016 is the year that I expect to see the implications of what has been happening over the past few years to become obvious. To take full advantage of enterprise cloud capabilities, IT must transform itself, which in turn will lead to business transformation. Cloud is not just another IT hype, and the philosophy behind cloud is about delivering to our customers what we were unable to deliver using traditional computing.

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