Five biggest cloud trends to look for in 2022

While Gartner foresees that the public cloud services in India will grow to a market size of $7.3 billion in 2022, an increase of 29.6% from 2021. Based on the ground reality working with over 300+ customer through their Cloud journey, we couldn’t agree more. Our internal forecast for Cloud growth for FY 22 is set to 50%, that will make our contribution equal to 1% of India’s forecast.

The trend that we have noted is that there is a rapid growing need for SaaS platforms and SaaS will contribute the maximum growth of Cloud in 2022. This will propel the growth of SMBs & Startups with good SaaS products.

Any Cloud transformation involve 3 key strategic considerations – 1) What will I retire? 2) What will be moved to Cloud? 3) What will be replaced? The 3rd area will see a phenomenal growth given the challenges of finding right set of talent & the complexity in re-development, maintenance and support application.

The outdated, expensive services will be replaced by easy to consume SaaS products allowing great opportunity of growth for Startups & SMBs. The key area that SaaS providers must focus on is to build highly scalable/available, compliant and automated deployment to maximize profits. App & Database modernization, Security and Business Continuity services will be the Services that will see a lot of demand in 2022 as a ripple effect.

We list down 5 biggest cloud trends to look for in 2022:

Application & Database Modernization
Often than not, modernization is linked to moving on to PaaS offering on Cloud. However, the true requirement for modernization is to build scale, automate & availability. This includes moving into multi-tenanted architecture for monolithic application, re-imaging application with API first approach and containerizing Database to support auto scaling. It is important to note that businesses have spent way too much time in the application landscape they have built over the years and just replacing them with modern apps are not easy from commercial or technical standpoint. Hence, modernization will also include building of integration layer to facilitate unified Digital front door solutions to provide access to all distributed applications in a single pane and interoperability of services through iPaaS offering from Cloud providers.

Security
Investment in Security will continue to grow with a shift in thinking to automate most of the security operations from Orchestration, Automation and Response. Cloud offers security tools and systems making it affordable and easy to use for business of any size. “50% of core Enterprise security actions will be executed on major public cloud platforms by 2022 – IDC future scope prediction”. The key driver for this is the Cloud providers investment in security and ride on economics of scale. From continues assessment to SEIM systems implementation and using logic apps to automate your response are the hot seller for most effective SoC allowing Security specialist to focus on threat hunting rather than mitigation.

Hybrid Cloud Deployment
Businesses that are still running on-prem have business requirement that do not allow them to move completely to Cloud. Hybrid Cloud deployments will continue to trend allowing business to expand to Cloud for new application, for processing and to handle scale. At G7 CR, we have over 5 Hybrid opportunity that came our way in the last month and we foresee such requirement continuing to trend in 2022.

Analytics
The power of data has always been underestimated. But, not anymore with businesses rolling out offers in seconds to meet the daily cash flow target is all powered by Analytics. With Cloud taking away the hefty investments in Datawarehouse devices, more businesses are embracing analytics with open hands, hearts & mind. Analytics combined with AI/ML for disruptive business decision making ability is another trend to look out for in 2022.

SaaS-ification
While most Enterprises are looking to modernize their legacy application, a lot of them are looking towards SaaS applications that are modern and can replace some of the legacy applications. Even Startups today, with the pace of growth they are needed to keep up with are replacing most of the services with SaaS and SaaS-ification has become the mantra for a lot of Unicorns that want to keep their focus on their technology are opting for fully managed data services that are offered as SaaS. Live Mint