Status & Trends — Cloud Transformation

The beginning of the year is a good time to take a step back and reflect on what we’ve accomplished in the past year and what our activity could be in the coming year.

I’m working in a consulting company and over the past year we have supported many companies on a wide range of topics related to Cloud, DevOps and Automation. This puts us in a good position to follow the evolution of the market and detect the new trends coming.

With this article I would like to share with you a feedback from my experience focusing on the market of Cloud transformation.

Market maturity

Lot of companies have now appropriated the notion of Cloud and DevOps culture.

Some are obviously more mature than others on the subject, but I think we can say that these topics are now taken into account in the transformation strategy of most companies. They consume public and/or private Cloud more intensively than before, with Move to Cloud projects at scale or more complexe strategies like hybrid Cloud or multi Cloud.

IT teams have also become more agile.

Not all embrace the DevOps methodology, or not all in the same way, but they have implemented tools and practices that have allowed them to become more efficient:

Platform standardization, using Configuration management tools and even standard Kubernetes deployment platforms, on-premise and in the Cloud.
Infrastructure as Code, taking the habbit to develop infrastructure and managing source code in a Source Code Management (SCM) system like Git, exactly as we do for business applications.
Release management, relying on a modern CI/CD toolchain to automate build, package and deployment steps. These delivery pipelines implement and formalize the process, allow to capitalize and participate to organize the collaborative work.
Cloud Native apps, with more reflection on application architecture and by taking advantage of ready-to-use bricks provided by Cloud Services Providers (CSP) or in Software as a Service (SaaS). The design can have an huge impact on the day 2 operation.

The result of this agility is that companies are now able to push new solutions on the market quickly than before. They are also able to integrate new technological changes more easily. Cloud infrastructure allows them to manage peaks in activity and the elasticity they need to support the growth of their projects.

Companies often have in-house skills and use assistance for advanced expertise. They need assistance for projects at scale or to define and implement strategical transformations.

Our knowledge of the market and our experience allow us to build together a strategy adapted to their needs, well organized and managing the risk. Our help allow them to carry out the transformation more quickly and to train all their teams in parallel. Currently, these major transformations are mainly Moves to the Cloud projects.

After having made transformations or implemented new technologies, they often need expertise to gain control, optimize processes or go even further. It can be improving observability and alerting tools, improving security, optimizing operations, building SRE teams, rationalizing infrastructure or optimizing costs.

Trends and challenges

Here are some of the trends that I see moving forward and that could be a focus for companies in the coming months.

Complex Cloud Strategies
Hybrid and multi-cloud strategies, but also migration from one CSP to another and edge deployment to bring technology in factories and in all companie’s point of presence.
**Security
**Security is a big concern for companies and the market is very active. Companies need to improve security for their infrastructures and applications taking into account the resurgence of mobility. We speak about implenting Zero Trust Policy and making a Shift Left to implement security further upstream in processes.
Sustainability
The climate change is here, its consideration can become a game changer for the durability of business. Legislation could evolve and constrain companies. But you have to keep in mind that sustainbility performance implies to be focus on added-value and limit waste. Its quite align with Lean and DevOps movments and often result in lower costs.
Sovereignty
It can become a key aspect in the future depending on the evolution of the legislation in each country and of geopolitic. Different aspects are important, services and infrastructure we use, but also and especially the data storage.
**Artificial Intelligence
**AI is arriving slowly in all sectors and in every services. Machine Learning (ML) is a specific job that needs a lot of clean data and compute power. Cloud services and collaborative ML tools represent good alternatives to benefit from already trained and ready to use models, it allows companies to start very quickly.
Web 3.0
This includes a set of technologies like Non Fongible Token (NFT), blockchain or Decentralized Applications (DApps) focus on data privacy. They could compromise some business model giving back to people and companies the ownership of their data and the capacity to use them as they wish.

Conclusions

In this article I focused on enterprise cloud adoption. I hope it helps you having a better understanding on the market. If you have any remark or questions, leave me a comment I will be happy do discuss it with you.

Initialement publié sur Medium.