By Adir Cohen, CEO of CaaB (Cloud as a Business)

Six Ways Cloud Will Further Impact the Business Climate in 2020

This spring, Gartner forecasted that the public cloud services market will top off at $214.3 Billion by the end of 2019 - up 17.5 percent from the previous year's figures - and will surpass the growth of other IT services by nearly three times through 2022.

With 90 percent of companies now on cloud, it will be valuable to know what cloud holds for the future and be ready for the changes coming your organization's way.

Quicker path to DevOps excellence. With business's constant demand to move forward - via new applications, continuous feature updates, and ongoing digitization - organizations will find that adopting cloud will give them the speed, nimbleness, and ease of use required to shorten systems development life cycles to continuously deliver high-quality software. Partner with DevOps-supporting cloud providers and respond to business needs in almost-real-time.

Lower computing costs. Say goodbye to the heavy upfront costs of computers and software licenses, upgrades and security updates. Simply "outsource" your computing needs to cloud to seize the advantages of continuously dropping cloud computing costs. Adopting cloud means you can reduce hardware costs by leaving them to the vendor rather than buying in-house equipment; cut space and energy expenditures with cloud storage; decrease labor and maintenance outlays while increasing workforce productivity; and lower capital investment with pay-as-you-go cloud pricing models.

Wider range of cloud integration options. With the burgeoning of cloud-based applications, organizations should now prioritize integrating these apps with each other and with on-prem systems. The good news is that more and more options - from integration platform software to custom code and many more - are available for integrating cloud applications, and organizations can select just the right integration approach that will deliver maximum value and optimize their business processes.

More cloud data centers within national borders. Regulatory compliance and privacy security are increasingly more critical; for this reason, more and more countries want to contain their data within their own borders. Fortunately, a slew of data centers are now up and running in North America, Europe, and Asia - where the development has increased both cloud adoption and the number of cloud vendors. Moreover, data centers are also sprouting in Israel, India, Singapore, Cambodia, and other markets, thus reducing cloud latency issues.

Greater competitiveness = better cloud service. According to Gartner,  the fastest-growing segment of the cloud computing market is Infrastructure as a Service or IaaS, which was predicted to reach $40.8 Billion in 2018. As more businesses embrace cloud infrastructure services to support their digital transformation strategies, IaaS providers will get ever more competitive and will need to offer better, more unique storage, networking, and virtualization services and/or expand their offerings.

Easier portability. With the increasing use of containers, which enables more efficient app deployment, and container orchestration, which manages container lifecycles to control and automate many tasks, cloud users can look forward to more perimeter-less environments - that is, multiple public clouds, private clouds, on-prem - and be able to run apps anywhere, maximizing the value of their investments.

As your organization moves more and more operations to the cloud, understanding these coming trends will help you adjust your strategies, select your provider, and take advantage of all that cloud has to offer.

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About the Author

Adir Cohen is CEO of CaaB, a cloud-solution provider allowing any MSP, VAR, or hosting company to deliver white-labeled cloud offerings to their customers within a day. www.caab.io