Riding the Wave of Cloud Computing & its Impact on Industry

Reliance on cloud computing, especially smart devices, is escalating. It’s not just you, it’s the entire industrial world.

Cloud Computing’s Huge Potential
Soon, all communication and collaboration will have the ability to happen anywhere in the world, at any time. Is your business riding the cloud computing wave?

Much like surfing, there’s really no way to integrate cloud computing into any industry and remain completely unscathed. Traditional systems must brace for the momentum from the swell of moving services, storage, email, collaboration tools, and a whole other rip current of concurrent applications to the private, public, or hybrid clouds.

So why jeopardize your business? Once the tumultuous short-term implementation subsides, the ultimate goal for cloud adoption is a smoother ride in the long-term when it comes to spending, saving, and—the Big Kahuna—infrastructural upkeep across many, many industries.“After years of cloud denial, we’re now seeing more CIOs and their direct reports bringing cloud into the enterprise,” said Senior Vice President of Saugatuck Technologies Bruce Guptill while on a panel at Cloud Business Summit 2015.

“There are thousands and thousands of case studies and examples [of] how we can improve our value to our organizations,” Guptill added. “It’s not replacing us, it’s a new set of tools and a new set of lenses creating more opportunity, and better able to see the opportunities it creates for our organizations.”

For the finance sector, the flipside means that the industry standard levels of caution, while usually quite rewarding, may need to fall along the wayside. Adoption of this new technology will most definitely require paddling through a bit of whitewater.

As Workday Vice President Mark Nittler once put it: it’s not about transition, it’s about replacement.

For financial executives, “That’s huge, it goes against what you see or hear. It’s not about the transformation of finance in our systems, but more about a need to replace them, in order to do what we need to do.”

Essentially, businesses need to embrace the fact that the transition path to cloud integration is bumpy but worth it. Don’t fear the close-out: there’s nothing impossible about embracing the future.

Cloud-based systems can alleviate the larger issues plaguing finance, manufacturing, supply chain, and other sectors, but demand immense organizational needs and incredible amounts of preparation.

“The technology piece really was not the roadblock,” Vice President of Technology for the New York Public Library Jane Aboyoun explained. “It required a cultural change, a process change, a behavioral change.”

Despite the inevitable anxiety, this new paradigm will streamline industries’ operations. Supply chains are being reimagined as “digital supply networks”, the manufacturing sector absorbs smartphones and tablets as tools to access cloud storage on the job, and business management seamlessly sends and receives data from remote locations or workers. Right now, an important shift is changing industry intelligence, costs, performance, and helpful analytics and reporting.

Ride the Wave to Work Smarter
A few years ago, Tech it Out blogger Craig Powers broke the Cloud down with an excellent pizza metaphor. When Powers considers IaaS (the cloud storage), PaaS (the cloud development), and SaaS (the cloud applications), he offers an alternative means to break down what cooks up the cloud.

Think of IaaS as all the elements needed to cook your pizza, PaaS as the place to store your ingredients, and SaaS as the software to save you the inessential phone call or car ride to [insert your favorite purveyor of cheesy oven-baked goodness here].

So how can you map out where cloud computing is headed? Technavio, a UK-based research firm, and Bubba Page, the Founder of Outro, have pointed out these emerging trends impacting the growth of the enterprise cloud services market in the next couple years.

1. A Greater Need for Integration
   Right now there are just shy of four million apps in today’s open market. As of February 2016, there were 3.97 million apps available for download or purchase. This includes Apple’s App Store (1.5 million), the Android Google Play Store (1.6 million), the Amazon App Store (400,000), the Windows Phone Store (340,000), and Blackberry World (130,000). Streamlining how collaboration works between multi-company projects calls for one major step in the right direction: integration amongst managed service providers’ apps and similar competitor applications. Without this, data security, work production lapses, and failed communications could be commonplace between collaborating organizations.
2. Increased Adoption of Hybrid Cloud Services
   This service is an optimal means for industries to meet regulatory compliance, benefit from scalability of the cloud, and make it a whole lot easier for organizations to avoid taking a wrecking ball to all of their existing infrastructure.
   Can you imagine that only 27 percent of organizations have the necessary resources for hybrid IT management? Calling service providers an important force in this adoption is an understatement.
   “The demand for hybrid cloud has been gaining popularity, particularly among midsize enterprises, including manufacturing companies, regardless of their expensive nature,” Technavio added in a statement.
3. Keeping Control of Data Security is Harder Than Ever
   The BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) market should hit $181 billion by year end of 2017, and 67 percent of employees are already using their own devices in the workplace. This cloud computing trend definitely isn’t ensuring easy tracking of what, when, and where data is being accessed. How do you avoid data security issues? By fighting cloud-based problems with cloud-based solutions: third-party security apps with the resources and know-how to protect your internal network and data.
4. Rise in Adoption of BYOD Policy
   Flexible workplaces call for cloud computing. As employees envelop wearables, tablets, and other smart devices into the company culture, especially when it comes to remotely accessing documents, cloud computing facilitates seamless collaboration, trade, and competitive gains across the value chain.
   By instituting policies for these new daily practices, companies can have a strong defense for themselves and their priceless data while offering employees flexibility and promoting productivity.
   Blue Coat’s Elastica Cloud Threat Labs team discovered that one in 10 documents shared at an organization contains sensitive data that is subject to compliance regulations, including protected health information and payment card industry data.
5. Emergence of Cloud Brokerage Services
   As more cloud service providers emerge, cloud service brokerages (CSB) will become essential in aiding companies with finding the perfect cloud services provider. While CSBs are nothing new, in the last few years larger companies have joined the marketplace.
   “The cloud service brokerage market has been witnessing extensive growth in recent years due to the advancements in integration of various services on hybrid cloud deployment model,” concluded Markets and Markets in a recent report. “Furthermore, the increasing adoption of integration of big data, BYOD, and mobility services on cloud is also encouraging the growth of CSB.”
6. The Explosion of SaaS Solutions
   Page and Eric Jackson of CapLinked both agreed on the gravity of the SaaS solutions boom and the importance of how these services fit into the digital ecosystem currently in place. Standardized APIs—the set of routines, protocols, and tools for software apps—could be an empowering piece to the SaaS puzzle for most companies. Legacy systems can thrive once a software as a service MSP can guarantee full integration without breaks or leaks.
7. DaaS’ Market Introduction
   Data as a Service offers an opportunity to cost-efficiently assist companies with making intelligent choices every day with the support of large volumes and wide variety of cloud-based data. The DaaS market is set to reach $48.6 billion in annual spending and grow by 23.1 percent through 2019.

Ready for the next Sea Change?In an August interview, the Vice President of Consumer Internet of Things and Head of Target’s San Francisco innovation office Gene Han addressed the necessity of the IoT for consumers, products, and for the overall goal of adding value by finding the “sweet spot” for the role of connected devices.

For example, in terms of supply chain, packaging practices illustrate:

“Whether it’s a cardboard box, cellophane envelope or acetate clamshell, the packaging needs to highlight how the product works, what’s innovative and how it will add value to consumers’ lives,” said Han.

“We don’t have to all hold hands and sing Kumbaya, but we do have to proactively adopt standards that will help the consumer. That’s why we’re here, right?”

It may not be Kumbaya, exactly. Finding your footing and embracing the oncoming surge of impacts of the future of cloud computing will feel pretty sweet.