We operate in a tough environment with many challenges, so it’s a welcome change to identify encouraging trends. One such development is that cloud adoption is continuing to grow positively.
From a security point of view, a lot of the original fear and concerns are starting to be allayed. People used to wonder about cloud security, but today, the security offered by cloud providers in most cases is more secure than a lot of people’s data centers. And I’d say documentation for configuring it has gotten much better, because you don’t see cloud providers ransomed. I expect security enhancements to continue in that space.
The cloud has matured a great deal over the past few years. There’s been a significant increase in tools available to users, both cloud-native and third-party products. That gives organizations a lot more flexibility.
Initially, when cloud came out, monitoring products were sparse. Integration points were less well understood. In the meantime there have been significant improvements in documentation and use cases by cloud service providers. The vendor marketplaces and ecosystems are better, to the point where vendor tools you were using on your premises might be extensible to the cloud. Compatibility is better. Migration pathways are better.
I also think people have reconsidered how you get to the cloud. Lift and shift used to be the prime example of how people were doing it, and probably one of the least effective ways to do it. It causes a lot of headaches, and it doesn’t avail you of the cloud-native benefits, like cost savings. There are things that don’t make sense to go in the cloud. Legacy platforms, for instance, probably don’t belong there. People used to lift and shift and wrap in the cloud and wonder why performance was worse.
Now, people are thinking through what really belongs on the cloud and what doesn’t, and I see more emphasis being placed on cloud-native adoption, to take advantage of things like containerization and microservices.
There’s a broader consumption of SaaS products nowadays. Almost everything is going now as a service, which essentially reinforces cloud messaging. Nobody wants to host their own HR system if they don’t have to, or their own payroll system. There’s now a broader understanding that what was once your own data center is now going to be a combination of different cloud service providers or SaaS providers. The tools to link across these things have gotten a lot better because the traditional data center has morphed into what is essentially data everywhere. You can be in Oracle, AWS, all these different environments because the tooling has improved to get better visibility across cloud and software as a service.
The original reasons people went to the cloud were speed, cost savings and innovation, with security bolted on later.
Now that organizations have a better understanding of how to use the cloud, the promise of driving costs out of the infrastructure is coming to fruition. There’s definitely been an acceleration in getting apps developed and into production for either internal business use or external customer use. Cloud is really where the innovation continues to happen. And the security ecosystem is much better, giving organizations a lot more flexibility.
With the cloud, things are headed in a good direction.