Many organisations have gone through – or are going through – the digitalisation process and moving from their legacy systems to the cloud.

It’s a switch that means different things for different businesses. You might, for example, opt for a wholly owned private cloud solution or choose to go with a massive public cloud service provider like Google or Amazon Web Services. You might choose a combination of the two, keeping your sensitive data on a private cloud while the bulk of your data sits on a public cloud platform.

Choosing which provider to work with will depend on things like avoiding vendor lock-in (so that you can move between providers as needed), costs and service levels.

Organisations that have already switched to cloud can attest to the increased levels of efficiency and data security they get, as well as benefiting from faster turnaround times and much-needed savings on overheads.

I believe that the key to finding and implementing a successful cloud solution lies in getting the strategy right – which may mean working with specialist partners who understand what optimisations you’ll need to make cloud perfect for what you need.

Preparing for the next stage of cloud computing

It’s worth looking at how we can expect cloud to evolve in the future and consider how your business could get an early start on developing the services and solutions that people will need.

I see cloud evolving in a number of ways, including:

  1. As AI-driven automation and analytics. Your business might, for example, use artificial intelligence to discover why its website keeps losing users and recommend how to stem the flow.
  2. Autonomous databases that will almost be able to run themselves.
  3. Quantum computing cloud services – allowing organisations to refine their business processes to a much finer degree.
  4. As a hub for virtual and augmented reality features, which will mean that businesses won’t need the local processing power to use these technologies. It will become easier for your business to create AR/VR solutions.
  5. Then there’s cloud gaming, which, while still in its infancy, will soon ensure that gamers don’t need dedicated hardware to play games – this may fuel demand for more access to high-speed, stable internet connections.
  6. We’ll also see generative AI helping to construct part of the cloud computing system.

Now that we see the general direction that cloud computing is evolving in, it’s easier to see how your organisation can develop potential services to meet future demands or prepare the business for the next stage of transformation. For example, maybe there’s a way your business can use autonomous databases to speed up innovation.

Part of our role in the Future Technology Division is to explore these potential developments and work out how our clients can benefit from them.