10 Cloud trends every tech leader should be aware of

Forrester predicted that the global public cloud infrastructure market will grow 35% to a value of $120 billion in 2021 with far-reaching impacts on the market. Tech leaders need to have a great understanding of the current trends in cloud, and implement innovative strategies to stay ahead of the curve and competitors.

Here are ten of the most important current trends in the Cloud talent market:

1. Sustainable, Low-Carbon Cloud

Companies are increasingly concerned their environmental impact. Accenture’s research suggests that migration to the cloud can reduce carbon emissions by up to 84% with a concurrent fall in energy consumption. The advantages to companies extend beyond simply reducing emissions, high environmental, social and governance (ECG) performance can also lead to increased profits, lower costs, and lower volatility. Cloud platforms are also recognising this - Azure enterprise customers can use the Microsoft Sustainability Calculator to review the carbon emissions of their IT infrastructure; while Amazon Web Services has a stated target for all their data centres to use 100% renewable electricity by 2025.

2. Artificial Intelligence

According to Statista, the global market value of artificial intelligence (AI) is estimated to surpass $89 billion dollars annually.  Cloud computing and AI go hand in hand, each serving to power the other, and companies that fail to embrace AI technology risk being left behind. AI services offered through the cloud have enabled companies to benefit from its insights into data management and workflow optimisation.

3. Bigger Budgets

As companies embrace the cloud, budgets for cloud spend have naturally increased. However, many companies consistently report that they are still under-budgeting their requirements by an average of 23% and that around 30% of that budget is even wasted. While trends show budgets for cloud computing will continue to increase due to the ever increasing usage fuelled by the pandemic, the next steps will be increased optimisation and better budget management for organisations and greater cost efficiency from cloud providers.

4. Edge Computing

Edge computing is an emerging trend that involves lessening the current reliance on large, centralised data processing centres in favour of smaller, more localised data centres that place servers where they are needed for fast access, reducing reliance on data transfers via the internet. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud each support customers to deploy workloads at the edge, as well as hybrid cloud platforms, such as AWS Outposts, Azure Stack, and Google Anthos, for more effective integrations.

5. Multi-Cloud strategies

As companies have experimented and grown their cloud strategies many have found that utilising multiple clouds, both public and private, can best serve their needs. Up to 93% of organisations now adopt a multi-cloud strategy. This growth has been driven by experimenting and adapting cloud services to the unique requirements of specific processes and has inherent governance risk. Avoiding vendor ‘lock-in’ will remove platform dependency, ensure easy ownership of data, and alleviate substantial switching costs.As the industry matures, functionality and time-to-market will improve and multi-cloud strategies will allow organisations to take advantage of trends, mitigate risk, and improve their feature capability.

6. Cloud Automation

Automation is increasingly being turned to as a way for organisations to simplify, analyse and compare cloud performance, particularly as multi-cloud approaches become more popular. Automation tools, especially cloud agnostic tools, can help organisations develop an identical cross-platform infrastructure, create dashboards to view multiple cloud services in one place, and provide analytics regarding efficiency, performance, and security. Automation can also remove some of the manual overheads typically associated with some traditional on-premises strategies.

7. Industry Optimization

Several industries, such as healthcare and finance, are subject to stricter regulations and controls and specific legislation regarding privacy such as GDPR and HIPAA. This has hindered their ability to leverage cloud services despite the obvious advantages to those sectors. Many cloud providers have responded to this by developing cloud capabilities that can cater to industry-specific requirements across public, private, and hybrid clouds.

8. Open-Source

According to The Enterprisers Project, 77% of Tech leaders plan to use open-source code more often for clear reasons. Proprietary software leaves companies at risk of lock-in and of technological obsolescence. Open-source cloud software increasingly allows organisations greater control at a lower overall cost. Additionally, open-source is usually of a higher quality, has better security and gives companies access to the latest innovations.

9. Application Mobility

The fast pace of innovation has created a need for applications to be increasingly agile. Application mobility allows organisations to migrate quickly and easily between platforms. This reduces downtime and data loss in the event of a crisis without tying applications down to a platform that runs the risk of becoming obsolete. Businesses should select a platform that integrates easily with the major public cloud providers. Implementing Kubernetes and container infrastructure (such as VMware) will enhance data flexibility, allowing the movement of entire apps or workloads as often as required.

10. Disaster Recovery Planning and Services

Disaster recovery has traditionally been a time consuming and costly process requiring companies and organisations to utilise a number of products and planning processes to create a robust disaster recovery plan. The shift towards Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) has been driven by the need to backup and recover increasing amounts of data, the majority of which is now in the cloud. However, the cloud allows for  innovative solutions such as hybrid cloud availability, cross-platform infrastructure management and monitoring.

Tech leaders looking to implement forward-thinking cloud strategies only have one other trend to be aware of; finding exceptional cloud talent, upskilling current teams and transforming their organisations to meet the future!

How can Energize help you to hire outstanding cloud talent?

Providing you with the best-possible recruitment experience is what drives us. We pioneered service standardisation within the recruitment industry via our implementation of Net Promoter Score®, and through our continual pursuit of customer excellence, customers choose Energize time and again, forming lasting relationships and enjoying a more effective – and successful – hiring process. With a global network of more than one million active and passive candidates cultivated over 14 years of recruitment expertise, Energize empowers organisations to access high-value local talent supported by specialist Consultants experienced in scaling businesses with the experts they need.

The Energize Group offers niche, premium staffing solutions on both a permanent and freelance basis to customers in the United Kingdom, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, and the United States of America. We can help you create truly diversity and inclusion-led recruitment strategies to ensure you’re attracting a diverse talent pool. From job advert language assessment, to supporting and nurturing established female talent, we can help you readdress the gender imbalance in tech and digital.

For expert guidance on Cloud and DevOps hiring strategies, contact Energize Group today.