A decade ago, people would have thought you were crazy if you told them that cloud technology would account for the majority of businesses’ workloads. Today, those folks would be wrong, as 79% of companies are running workloads in the cloud. In fact, Forbes predicted that 80% of all IT budgets in 2018 will be spent on cloud solutions.

So what can you expect from the cloud this year? Here are five cloud predictions that can impact your cloud decisions.

Hybrid clouds will dominate the market

Despite hybrid cloud being the buzzword in 2017, what many business owners are actually doing is consolidating cloud services from different providers to meet specific needs. This isn’t hybrid cloud at all, but rather a multi-cloud strategy.

True hybrid clouds are made up of multiple cloud infrastructures whereby a cloud-hosted private infrastructure is able to utilize the resources that the public infrastructure has to offer. Think Azure and Azure Stack from Microsoft, VMware’s partnership with AWS, and Google’s collaboration with Cisco. These tech giants are leveraging multiple cloud environments to improve the infrastructure agility, efficiency, and scalability. Having said that, you can expect hybrid clouds to see widespread deployment this year.

Kubernetes will dominate the world of cloud container

The three-way container war among Docker, Kubernetes, and Mesos has been going on for years. However, Kubernetes is leading the competition with support from various industry leaders like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, which recently introduced their respective managed Kubernetes services. IBM also announced support for this open-source container orchestration using its private cloud, and Amazon Web Services is right behind them.

Needless to say, Kubernetes has seen more scalable deployments, contributors, and rapid support across multiple platforms than its competitors.

AI will enhance cloud analytics

Artificial intelligence is being integrated into analytic systems, resulting in better insight into the behavior of each infrastructure and application. Thus, cloud-based analytics will soon be able to recognize anomalies so that automations can be created to remediate issues quickly.

Serverless computing will start to gain traction

This pay-by-use cloud model allows businesses to build and run its applications and services without having to provision, scale, and manage any servers. This means developers will no longer have to define the amount of storage and database capacity needed pre-deployment, which makes app and service development easier than ever.

Serverless computing is already available in public clouds. And as IT vendors maintain relevance with this new cloud-powered solution, it’s only a matter of time before it’s integrated into private cloud deployments too.

New cases of custom cloud will appear

As cloud adoption continues to grow, so too will the segmentation and optimization of new cloud solutions. Applications such as big data, AI, and network monitoring will soon be enhanced with customized features based on workloads, CPUs, and memory.

The world of cloud computing is constantly changing. As more people find innovative ways to utilize the infrastructure, staying up-to-date with these changes can make or break your business. Whether or not these predictions hold true, the SimplyClouds team can help you with cloud migration, customization, maintenance, and support. If you have any questions about the cloud, just give us a call to get all the answers.