Cloud deployment trends - changes are creeping in

Cloud adoption has reached its highest tipping point over the last three years (2010-14). There would be no organisation that has not touched cloud in one form or the other. According to IDC research, the cloud deployment in private mode is hovering around 50% and public cloud at 40% in large enterprises. But is cloud a single entity ? I'm not referring to XaaS like IaaS, SaaS or PaaS nor the public, private or hybrid cloud. The concept of cloud itself is made up of  the infrastructure + services coupled with adjacent services like cloud migration, application modernisation, mobility etc. If we look at the IT spend of enterprises, the IaaS component constitutes around 4% whereas the adjacent services makes up the rest. Isn't this the evidence of changing trends in cloud computing ?

If I were to write this post a year back I would have concentrated on trends in cloud adoption like public, private or hybrid clouds. Though they are still relevant with enterprises being open to adopt public cloud or hybrid, the dynamics have really changed. The behemoth, GE is the new poster boy of public cloud as in one the news articles published, it's reported upto 90% of its applications are run on public cloud. Looking at more examples, the gaming company Zynga moved from public cloud to private to improve its profitability and bottom line. These examples clearly defined the strategic internet behind - for some agility is the key, for rest cost may be the biggest challenge. Irrespective of what parameters the enterprises depend on choosing the cloud deployment model - there is no simple formula to define which mode to deploy.

As the cloud adoption reaches its highest peak and maturity,  the industry is pushing for more sstandardised services and easy to access tools. These standardisations are key for hybrid deployment where an application can seamless move from private hosting to public on spiky demand and vice versa. This also brings down the initialisation and deployment time. The standardisation might also cannibalize the services industry. Looking at the monolithic software vendors like Microsoft, SAP, IBM etc. who are moving to cloud ready applications is an indication for this. They are also deploying applications suited for public cloud. So, imagine a vertical integration - an enterprise running a SaaS on a PaaS will choose the IaaS from the same vendor. Isn't this a concern for the services industry ?

The cloud services industry will see a sea of change by 2020. As per the IDC analysis, by 2020 the number of cloud service providers would have reduced significantly. The players would be either vertically integrated like software vendors running XaaS or telecom operators like Verizon deploying end to end infrastructure. Would the cloud phenomenon see a change even before organizations make good sense of it?

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