2016: The year ahead in the cloud

With the rise of digital transformation, enterprises are looking for an IT infrastructure that can deliver flexibility and agility alongside fail-safe security. 

 The cloud is the new IT architecture for enterprise, but enterprise WAN is not optimised for the cloud. Although the cloud promises greater agility and performance, connectivity can be slow, inflexible, and in some cases high cost. Meanwhile, the public internet cannot meet demands for secure, reliable, and predictable performance.

Tata Communications’ IZO, combines the public internet uniquely engineered to deliver business-class SLAs and encryption with enterprise cloud connectivity and interconnected data centres to deliver a total cloud enablement solution that is predictable, secure, and reliable. This helps CIOs navigate all the complexities to meet their goals as well as consolidate disparate elements of IT architecture into a robust single solution so that they can gain 360-degree visibility and complete control.

Game changer

Cloud computing will continue to be a game changer for IT. Enterprises will invest more in cloud services, boosting demand for network services and data centres. With cloud services, enterprises don’t need to make huge investments in infrastructure to use a huge infrastructure.

According to a Computerworld Forecast survey, over 40% of the respondents said that in 2015, their organisations will increase their spend on SaaS and a mix of public, private, hybrid, and community clouds – this is only going to grow in the coming year. With more applications, computing, and data storage moving to the cloud, data centres will continue to transform as the work load increases. This will spark a new generation of cloud-based hardware innovations that merge server, storage, software and networking.

 A global survey conducted by Tata Communications showed that by 2024 off-premises storage will have overtaken on-premises alternatives, with enterprises forecast on average to have 58% of their compute and data storage held in the cloud in 10 years’ time compared with 28% currently. There is huge potential in the cloud market and cloud will certainly live up to the hype. 

However, security will remain to be one of the biggest market challenges in 2016 as more and more enterprises move their business to the cloud. The other challenge will be how fast they can transform their businesses to stay competitive. Enterprises need to prioritise their digital initiatives in order to reap its benefits in terms of increased productivity, wider access to data and cost control.

What do you think 2016 will look like for cloud computing? Leave your comment below.