The cloud is hot – hotter than ever – and in this coming year, it’s important for businesses to take part in, or at least acknowledge, the trends that are changing the industry. Here are six particular considerations you’ll want to make for the cloud this year, whether you’ve embraced its possibilities and are looking to improve, or are considering jumping into the hype for the first time.
1. Energy Efficiency
Arguably one of the greatest advantages the cloud offers is its freedom from the constraints of both space and energy. In recent years, businesses have been looking to boost their profits by cutting costs where they can and boosting their influence on the public, and the cloud allows them to do both. By being more self-contained and requiring less equipment, the cloud can take less energy. When deciding on your budget for this year, it’s important to remember that the cloud can save you a great deal of money in the long-run, so be ready to allocate your money elsewhere if you’ve already invested in it, or invest now if you haven’t.
2. Downtime
The joys of having remote storage and computing software are its flexibility and reliability, but both of these are a double-edged sword. By having less hardware and less chance of failure, businesses are able to trust that the cloud will be available no matter the local disasters, outages, and so on. However, the cloud is not exempt from tragedy and no server is safe from downtime. In this coming year, it’s important to prepare for your cloud to crash and leave you with several hours of dead air, wherein you’ll have to adapt and try to accomplish what you can and save what you can while the service comes back online.
3. The Internet of Things
Like it or not, the Internet of Things (IoT) is happening, and it’s happening now. The cloud works as a perfect tool to manage and help maintain the IoT, and soon businesses will not be able to function without either using or creating products that are compatible to an interconnected world. If you are already equipped with cloud storage and technology, it’s important to prime your business to also accept the IoT and move along with the competition. If you haven’t embraced the future of cloud yet, it’s important to realize your rivals will have a competitive edge over you, and it’s important to cash in now on the opportunity before it really takes off.
4.Hacking Has Increased
Hacking has always been a danger, but especially in the modern age where more and more vital information is digital, it’s a greater danger than ever. The cloud is notorious for being a target of hacking by freelance cyber terrorists or entire groups of digital thieves, and that means those with cloud already installed must take greater precautions in the coming year. The methods in place already are not enough for you or for your customers. It’s important to employ greater tools to safeguard the data and better automated systems for verifying authentic users versus hackers.
5.Converged Infrastructure Will Be Crucial
Saving time and money is more important than ever for businesses of the digital age, and this is where converged infrastructure comes into play. Rather than having several divisions to handle different facets of a problem, businesses are converging it into a single system which can be automated or handled by a much smaller group of experts, saving the time needed for group collaboration or searching around within the data to find the information needed. In 2016, this approach is only going to become more prevalent, making it important for both cloud and non-cloud users to look out for this trend.
6.Limited Immigration
Certain vendors are very protective of their services, and this means it’s difficult for businesses to immigrate their cloud usage to others should they evolve beyond the services they’re gaining from one vendor. This means it’s important to be very careful which vendors you choose in the coming year to ensure you save the time and the money required to make the change
The cloud has a major influence on modern society and business. These are six different trends that must be taken into consideration for any business, whether you’ve embraced the future of cloud or not.
