The New Year is getting closer, which means that the most fertile time for a variety of forecasts is coming. Initially, we planned to cover several aspects of the IT industry at once, but given how voluminous the article began to turn out, as well as the invisible sword of Damocles hanging over many industries lately, we decided to make a more highly specialized material. Today we are going to talk about the clouds, what development prospects await numerous cloud services in the near future, and also that no technology should be fully relied on.
On April 12, 2018, the analytical agency Gartner published the results of a study of the development of the cloud services market. According to the data presented, spending on cloud platforms has grown by more than 30% over the past two years, with the lion's share of costs falling on software delivered in the form of a service (SaaS) and infrastructure services (IaaS), and the total costs of commercial enterprises and private individuals on public clouds totaled $ 153.5 billion against $ 118 billion in 2016.
If the IaaS segment grew by $ 4.7 billion, then SaaS - by as much 21.6 billion. PaaS solutions (business platform as a service) also showed strong results in percentage terms, adding 4.7 billion in weight with a total capitalization of $ 7.2 billion as of 2016. Spending on BPaaS (business process automation solutions) and cloud-based security management services also increased, reaching 42.6 billion and 8.7 billion, respectively.
According to Gartner analysts, the popularity of clouds will continue to grow in the coming years, and SaaS will continue to lead the way: by 2021, this segment will account for 45% of global software spending. The most dynamic sector of the market is IaaS, which has shown 40% growth this year.
Researchers at Cisco are also predicting an equally bright future for cloud services. At the beginning of the year, the corporation published the traditional report Cisco Global Cloud Index 2016-2021 ("Global index of cloud technologies development in the period from 2016 to 2021"), in which it noted the dominance of cloud services on the Internet, which is facilitated by the increased popularity of both consumer, and business applications. In the latter case, the most intensively developed solutions in the field of enterprise resource management (ERP), analytics systems and platforms for collaboration.
As a result, a significant increase in multi-cloud traffic is expected in the coming years: as early as 2021, the turnover of information in data centers serving cloud services promises to grow 3.3 times, reaching 19.5 zetabytes (for comparison, in 2016 this figure was only 6 zetabytes ), while the total cloud traffic will reach almost 95% of the global. The reaction to the increased workload will be quite natural: the number of hyperscale public data centers will continue to increase and in just three years will almost double (628 against 338 at present). Thus, by 2021, hyperscale data centers will account for 70% of all computing power.
The main drivers of such rapid growth are the spread of IoT (for example, if now the number of IoT connections is about 5.8 billion, then in three years this figure will reach 13.7 billion), the further development of the concept of "smart" cities, the introduction of modern technologies in such sectors of the economy like energy and healthcare. In addition, the growth of cloud traffic is influenced by innovations in the field of information security and the cheapness of cloud services, which is determined by the economies of scale. According to Cisco experts, all of the above will lead to the fact that by 2021 the cloud technology market will approach the following indicators:
1) 94% challenges facing the business, will be tackled by the cloud data center, whereas in traditional data centers have to share only 6% of the calculation;
2) The global volume of data stored in the data center will increase 4.6 times, and 30% of them will make Big Data;
3) Thanks to the development of the Internet of things, the total amount of generated data is higher than the volume of stored information to be two orders of magnitude and 837 zetabayt.
"This development of events is quite natural, - said the director of research in the field of cloud services Gartner Sid Nag (Sid Nag). “Following current trends, business is striving to find the easiest and cheapest way to create a new IT infrastructure and redistribute workloads from the existing one. In this sense, SaaS and IaaS are truly out of competition, opening up almost unlimited opportunities for market participants. However, going to the clouds is fraught with many dangers: in the end, a situation may arise when providers will have an almost uncontrollable influence both on the customers themselves and on the market as a whole. "
Concerns expressed by the expert, it is quite clear, however, Sid Nag did not realize that the danger lies not only in the potential abuses by the holders of service.