2015 was the year that cloud computing went mainstream, becoming a preferred option for everyone from individuals to giant, conservative enterprises. In 2016, the cloud — and this is the public cloud, not the un-cloud often called “private cloud” — will increasingly become the default option for everything from storage to computing to apps to analytics. In fact, we are going to see more and more instances where companies rip and replace functioning on-premises solutions to move to the cloud.
Looking at some of the cloud news covered in 2015:
April: Earnings reports from Amazon and Microsoft conclusively confirm what we should have already known: cloud computing is on a rampage.
May: Game giant Zynga abandons its hugely expensive move to its own data centres and returns to the Amazon cloud. Basically, the company ripped and replaced a $100 million (€91 million) data centre investment in favour of the cloud.
July: IDC says nearly one-third of all IT infrastructure spending is now devoted to cloud computing. Companies are voting cloud with their wallets.
July: Cloud to consume almost half of IT infrastructure sales by 2019.
October: Amazon and Microsoft post big cloud computing earnings. Again.
October: AWS re:Invent draws huge crowds and introduces products and services designed to make moving to the cloud safe for even the most conservative enterprises.
October: In a $67 billion (€61 billion) reaction to the cloud’s growth, Dell buys EMC in the largest tech deal ever. Analysts are split whether Dell is either trying to move deeper into the cloud or fight the cloud’s dominance.
This is far from a complete picture, of course, but there are many more cloud computing stories from 2015 that point out the technology’s increasing dominance.
However, HP said it would quit the public cloud business, but that is mainly because it could not keep up with the runaway success of Amazon and a few others. In November, the US Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said the cloud, including the public cloud, was “acceptable” for fintech firms to use.
Even as analyst firms are busy upping their projections of public cloud growth, it is not clear they understand the magnitude of what is happening here.
It will not be long, perhaps not in 2016, but soon, before any computing project that does not happen in the cloud will have to spend many cycles justifying what will be seen as an old-fashioned and inefficient approach.
A few companies still generate their own electricity, but they are rare and special cases. That is the kind of market dominance cloud computing is headed for. And we are likely to get there faster than we think.
Fredric Paul, IDG News Service
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