No Signs of Slowing down for Cloud Tech

 

Expanding even further

The cloud is expanding even further, mainly because cloud providers have been exceptionally good at mastering the art of economy of scale. As cloud adoption has grown, the hyperscalers have reaped the rewards from increasing volume and shared that cost reduction with their customers. And for a good reason: as cost goes down, customers use more. That gives the economy of scale, allowing cloud providers to lower the per-unit price even more. 

There seems to be no end in sight to that continuing cycle. It has become a self-supporting mechanism. 

Faster and cheaper

At the same time, computing has become faster and cheaper, as have storage and networking—in fact, everything in the cloud technology cycle. It seems that Moore’s Law is still in effect: the number of transistors and integrated circuits doubles about every two years. And that doubling has generally corresponded to cost optimizations in the cloud sphere.

But reducing cost is only one side of the matter. There are other factors that have shaped and continue to shape the cloud.

For instance, new types of use cases are emerging. For example, companies and organizations are increasingly activating the vast amounts of data they produce. Previously, they had the data but were often unsure how to utilize it. Now, we are seeing an uplift in the use of analytics on large data, both structured and unstructured, to extract knowledge from the data. As an example, looking at the energy market and trying to work on determining energy utilization and usage across a network, coming up with models that can predict how much power is likely to be produced and used under certain weather conditions.

Other data-intense cloud-based technologies and use cases are emerging, many of the centered around computer vision. Also, real-time translation is another fascinating and promising cloud-enabled technology.

New levels of compliance

Furthermore, cloud providers are continuously achieving higher levels of compliance with various governance requirements. For example, we’re seeing special deployments set up for governments, meeting their specific requirements for cyber security and data sovereignty. As compliance evolves, cloud providers will continue to innovate to meet these higher requirements so that their clients can use their services without risk.

All this means that larger amounts of the tech operations of the businesses that we know and use will move more and more workloads to the hyperscale and cloud providers and less and less in the bespoke local on-premises data centre or co-location facility.

From support to DevOps

As a side effect, as these systems become more crucial to operations, they require higher care. To address this need, support is gradually transitioning to being operated by DevOps. While traditional support is about having your digital service running at the lowest possible cost, now more and more critical workloads are better supported by a DevOps model. Such a model is obviously more costly. On the other hand, it secures the outcome regarding cyber security, efficiency, and fit-for-purpose of the workload to today’s requirements.

Sustainability

Energy consumption is another aspect that has gained traction in recent years. Companies and organizations have corporate sustainability goals and look to reduce their environmental footprint when using the cloud.

There are ways to do that, such as moving from virtual machine-based computing to event-based computing or choosing more energy-efficient CPUs. Equally important is having your whole cloud setup well-maintained and well-architected. If not, technical debt starts to creep in, and the setup risks missing out on opportunities to become cheaper, faster, better, and greener.

Harnessing Cloud innovation

Akkodis is a versatile and well-respected service provider in the cloud tech space. We have an obligation to stay at the forefront of new trends in the domain. That means continuously communicating with our clients about harnessing cloud innovation for their specific purposes.

Internally we prioritize constantly bringing in fresh talent, and to mentor, nurture, and educate our cloud specialists. For many years we’ve invested time and effort in senior engineers mentoring junior engineers, and simultaneously finding inspiration in what young people fresh out of university can bring to the table.

That is the most crucial thing here: The cloud continues to make promises, but you must have talented engineers to deliver on these promises. At Akkodis, we have hundreds of those talented engineers, delivering and continuing to manage and optimize cloud solutions for our clients.