Y
es, believe it or not, we have closed out yet another decade in technology. As we are entering the second generation of the “Roarin’ 20s,” it felt like the perfect time to look back on the ‘10s. Even though cloud technology was widely available prior to 2010, the technology has made significant strides in gaining acceptance as the de facto business solution. From communications to storage to backup, the cloud is now where it is at.
In the beginning….
There were three cloud giants that emerged. Between Google, AWS, and Microsoft, the cloud market was valued at an astonishing $24.65 Billion. Early in 2019, it was projected to be as high as $150 Billion by the start of 2020, although official numbers aren’t available at the time of this writing. And the staggering growth it is no surprise to those who have been in the cloud industry for some time. With statistics like the following, as reported by TechJury, you won’t be surprised either:
● 80% of companies report operation improvements within the first few months of adopting the tech.
● Small and medium businesses find it 40% more cost-effective to employ third-party cloud platforms than maintaining an in-house system.
● 94% of businesses report significant improvements in online security after moving their data to the cloud.
In the 10’s was when cloud solutions truly came into their own, thanks to the efforts of these original cloud giants.
And then there was…less?
Serverless, that is. Born just 6 years ago, in 2014, Lambda was launched at the 2014 AWS re:Invent conference, with Google and Microsoft close at their heels. Serverless computing is not exactly serverless, it just moves the software compute power from internal systems to a cloud provider’s infrastructure, enabling the ability to scale at significantly greater rates than traditional software solutions. And so was born software-as-a-service.
Minimize and contain
In 2013, Docker was introduced as the first platform-as-a-service provider, offering enterprise-grade container platforms. CIO says a “container consists of an entire runtime environment: an application, plus all its dependencies, libraries and other binaries, and configuration files needed to run it, bundled into one package.“ Containers achieved popularity due to their ability to enable workload portability, essentially making it so a developer could write something in one place and then run it anywhere, driving the substantial growth predicted by Research 451. In 2016, the research firm predicted the market would grow from $749 Million to more than $3.4 Billion by 2021.
Out of containers grew microservices, enabling reduced costs and enhanced resource efficiency by running apps on smaller services, and further accelerating the development of new technologies.
Cloud Becomes Commoditized
Dedicated connections to providers such as Amazon (2011) and Azure (2014) and now the technology is so advanced that any business can connect an existing infrastructure to the cloud. Further commoditizing cloud solutions was the introduction of virtual private clouds, where users can piece off a portion of the public cloud for their own private use. Deloitte Consulting’s chief cloud strategy officer and industry expert, David Linthicum, put it this way when discussing virtual private clouds, “That was a big change and not expected to happen, and suddenly, all the objections people had around what public cloud is fall away.”
Everyone goes SaaS-y
The rise of containers and the commoditization of the cloud-enabled the next generation of cloud services: Software-as-a-Service or SaaS. Gartner reports that the market is projected to grow at a rate of 17.5%. Although SaaS was introduced at the beginning of the decade, it wasn’t until 2016 that the solution became the dominant solution for software delivery, surpassing on-premise, licensed software. A subset of SaaS, known as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is the fastest-growing segment in the market, shaking up the technology industry as we know it.
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Moves “Up” in the World
Business continuity and disaster recovery has been a business priority since operations moved to computers, even more so when computers became connected to the world wide web. But in 2014, organizations began to test the theory that all of their data could be backed up to “the cloud”
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Helpful links
3 Security Threats Your Business Should Be Preparing for Now
ConnectWise Control Used As Entry Point In Texas Ransomware Attack
Managed service providers are ransomware hackers’ new gold mine
Experts say same virus used in November’s state hack may be culprit of NOLA cyberattack
