At this time of year, businessmen and small business owners look to the coming year to see how new trends will affect their business.  The top cloud predictions for 2019 surely fall into the category of new trends, as do many others.

You already know that firms reap greater profits faster by minimizing costs. For IT, investing in infrastructure and its maintenance and upgrade is a more expensive risk than hiring a cloud service provider that gives you practically the same benefits at much lower costs. No wonder the growth of cloud services is currently outpacing that of everything else in the IT industry.

The cloud has grown in prominence in both consumer-to-business (C2B) and business-to-business (B2B) spheres. Consumers have embraced the cloud, given the ubiquity of streaming services such as Netflix and Spotify. These allow millions of people to consume enormous amounts of content without having a copy of a media file in their devices.

Cloud computing has an even larger role to play for B2Bs, with the decline of software license purchases and the rise of subscriptions to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications in recent years. Productivity apps in platforms such as Office 365 let staff collaborate on the same file in real time and at different locations. Other cloud-enabled innovations include global networks that support aggressive expansion, reliable and fast backups for business continuity, and disaster recovery.

The cloud has come a long way, but it is not yet finished revolutionizing the world of business. Here are four of the top cloud predictions for 2019.

Trend #1 – Modernization of enterprise-level business applications will go full steam ahead

Large enterprises will allocate more funds to replace or upgrade their legacy core business applications with the latest cloud-based ones. KPMG projects that in 2019, investment in platform-as-a-service (PaaS) will nearly double its 2016 growth rate. Functions such as inventory management and data warehousing will not only live on the cloud, but they’ll also be enhanced by technologies that are emerging from the cloud, such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, and the internet of things.
Translation: Beyond allowing you to store huge amounts of data remotely and execute processes at a global scale, cloud computing will derive actionable business insights and power automated processes for you as well.

Trend #2 – Cloud services and solutions will continue to proliferate as digital innovators build on existing technologies

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), developers will create completely new cloud SaaS apps by reusing old code or piecing together components of different software. The resulting explosion of innovation will lead to an 18% compounded annual growth rate for subscription-based SaaS apps by 2020.

Trend #3 – Businesses will shift towards hybrid cloud solutions

Just a few years ago, businesses worried about choosing between public clouds and private clouds. Small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) usually opted for public clouds because these were more affordable. And they didn't need to be responsible for managing and maintaining data centers, since these were owned by cloud service providers. Larger companies, on the other hand, preferred private clouds because having these behind their own firewalls helped them protect their data better.

As cloud technologies mature, firms will be better able to mix public and private clouds to optimize the advantages and mitigate the disadvantages of each.

Trend #4 – Regulations will make using the cloud more complicated

As governments play catch-up to tech’s progress, companies will have to comply with burgeoning sets of regulations that differ across industries and among nations. For instance, the EU has the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), whereas the healthcare industry in the US has the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Staying in line with all applicable laws will definitely be challenging. The headache of having varied regulations is exacerbated by the constant presence of hackers who threaten data security.

Innovations in cloud computing bring immense business opportunities as well as tough challenges. Businesses trust SimplyClouds to anticipate cloud developments to help keep them always one step ahead of their competition. Reach out to us and take advantage of our reliable expertise and affordable cloud services for business.