The 2019 Cloud Trends in Review: A Building Boom

We are closing out another big year in cloud computing. The trends in 2019 show an entirely new pace of cloud adoption throughout organizations of all types, featuring all the milestones you’d expect, including growth, partnerships, and so on—but adoption was accelerated and tectonic shifts happened in emerging cloud components from containers, to edge, to government adoption of cloud.

Containers Reach Two-Thirds of Enterprises

While cloud containers are a relatively new cloud feature—for instance, Docker just celebrating its fifth year—it has achieved significant enterprise adoption. Industry reports show that containers and container management systems, such as Kubernetes, have reached up to two-thirds of the enterprise market, creating a tech adoption explosion for this new technology.

On-Prem Impact

Signs of a decline in on-premise computing continue to pop up with various reports showing that public and hybrid cloud spending grew in 2019 at the expense of on-premise expenditures. Cloud growth is eating legacy data centers’ lunch and smiling about it. Even as some vendors claim on-premise repatriation, the changes are clear.

Data on the Edge

Edge computing is transforming the IT landscape right before our eyes. The concept of edge computing is characterized by a fundamental shift in data and application strategy, using the cloud as a foundation and driving data in proximity to the point of consumption. Through these changes, every point of the data experience will conform to that shift, including applications, data, storage, and networking.

While edge computing is only in use for 10% of enterprise data now, a Gartner forecast report indicates that by 2025 more than 75% of corporate data will be on edge computing outside of on-premise data centers. With 5G networks just on the way, yet another ingredient of a coming adoption boom is just around the corner.

Government Cloud

Another affirmation of global cloud adoption, the Department of Defense (DoD), as well as other major government agencies, charged full speed ahead toward cloud initiatives. While there were many cloud projects commissioned throughout the year, the massive $10 billion JEDI DoD cloud computing contract made the biggest headlines.

As new capabilities come into the government’s technological potential, outdated notions of slow responding, inefficient government IT departments will start to diminish. Beyond savings and capital expenditure, the current mission tone focuses on rapid development for platforms to introduce security, speed of deployment, performance, scale, and edge capabilities. More than ever, the cloud is the government’s technology path forward.

Industry Consolidation

2019 proved a continuing cloud horse race is here, seeing various brands and products transitioned, merged, and re-emerged with a refreshed business focus, product services, and alignment. Driven by the needs of the modern enterprise in a rapidly moving world of cloud options, this pivot is a harbinger of continuing consolidation within the industry. The monolithic mega-clouds are growing, along with an ecosystem of cloud-agnostic managed service providers that provide unique services focused on enterprises.

Our own company went through a significant transformation this year to better deliver comprehensive enterprise cloud solutions, starting with our merger of Hostway and Hosting and followed by the launch of our new brand, Ntirety. Growing stronger together for our clients and teams, Ntirety proactively reduces risk and optimizes costs to help businesses evolve into future-ready, agile enterprises.

Security Is King

Big names businesses have suffered from data breaches and ransomware attacks in 2019, a trend that can affect organizations of all sizes and industries—and one that will continue in the year ahead. The ever-growing threat of ransomware plagues the industry and disproportionately affects organizations that don’t have the investment potential to protect their systems through strategy, teams, and technology fully.

In addition to outside attacks, cloud storage misconfigurations continue to result in data leaks. Companies also struggle with the management of privileged and root account usage, implementing strong identity and access management policies, and visibility into their cloud-based/on-premise systems, even on technologies that have these features built-in.

This past year has shown us that there is a lot of room for cybersecurity improvement across the board and that enterprises need to be more proactive in their data protection.

What It All Means

As the year comes to a close, it is clear that most established organizations are in the cloud already, or are using hybrid, multi-cloud products. At this moment, performance and optimization innovations in the cloud set the stage for cloud adoption acceleration. You now can take your pick of technology features—AI, scalability, machine learning, containerization, edge computing, high-performance computing, big data, the list goes on—or you can choose them all to make hybrid cloud a reality.