Since the pandemic hit last year, 2020 was a year where we saw upheaval turbulence and powerful cloud adoptions transformations.
So how has COVID accelerated the cloud’s standing in the business world?
Well, as entire workforces across the world moved to remote working, companies across the globe suddenly found themselves scrambling to react to the entirely new, complex and often entirely unforeseen emergency requirements which seemingly landed on their (now-virtual) desks overnight.
While disruption of this magnitude would represent a significant hurdle for any strong IT department, the instantaneous elasticity, flexibility and proven reliability of cloud service providers will have been the saviour of many an organisation fortunate enough to have a mature cloud adoption strategy.
Lets not forget, many organisations still rely on their on-site datacenter operating models and for these corporate firms they would have had major hurdles to refactor long standing legacy systems to operate within remote working environments for the very first time.
So what should all corporations consider going into this year 2021? Below we have listed the top 5 elements to embed in your cloud strategy for now and the future.
1. 2020 has proven to be the defining moment for public cloud.
Business leaders across the globe have experienced first-hand the lifesaving agility that cloud-centric models can bring to their operations. Many organisations who hadn’t yet seriously started on their journey to cloud will have been forced to overcome their former skepticisms and extend into cloud as an urgent matter of survival. While those already cloud-first in nature have only been reassured that their strategic technical direction was the right way to go.
2.Expect to see a heavily accelerated rate of cloud hybrids and cloud native strategies across an ever-extending range of industry sectors.
This rate of increase will be especially predominant for organisations relatively new to the cloud, having overcome the initial key base barriers to adoption in response to the emergency COVID situation. For these “cloud-inexperienced” organisations who scrambled to hastily deploy cloud solutions are likely to face a significant level of technical debt. These organisations should therefore be looking at the next steps to de-risk through other elements including heavy optimisation of the cost, security, performance, reliability and operational procedures of their cloud services. These organisations need to be wary though not to lose sight of de-risking costs for the short term which may later on impact them on their long term version.
3. There will be a surge in adoption of cloud-centric workflows and collaboration tools.
The adoption of cloud-centric workflow and collaboration tools like Office365 and other Desktop-as-a-Service offerings like Amazon’s AWS, will only continue to surge.
An increasing number of organisations will move towards these “zero-trust architectures”, as the focus moves away from traditional network perimeters and instead in favour of SaaS-orientated services alike to support the hybrid working from home (a few days of the week) business models companies are likely to adapt whilst the world is working through the easing of lockdowns and social distancing government rules.
4. Cloud migration modernisation.
The Cloud migration application will be an incredibly important market for cloud vendors and consultancies from 2021 and beyond. The cloud migration and modernisation of the market is currently estimated to be worth - $88bn but is expected to grow towards a worth of - $516bn by 2027.
This means we can expect to see cloud vendors focused on releasing a load of additional migration-facilitating tools and services – their goal will be to make the transition process as painless and shift as possible.
In the short term, many organisations commonly will begin their migration journeys with a (relatively) simple “lift-and-shift” process of existing apps and supporting infrastructure, before embarking on longer term strategic re-engineering and digital transformations in order to fully leverage on the benefits of true cloud-native architectures.
5. The future of hiring new top talent for cloud specialists.
The uncertainty of the global pandemic has changed companies' outlook on hiring fundamentally because of the economics of it. Instead, we are seeing companies increasingly opting to invest internally - and upskilling their existing staff through various cloud training and certifications.
With that being said, specialist cloud consultancies have remained and will likely stay in high demand as a necessity to bridge internal skills and experience gaps.
2020 was the year that set alarm bells on the importance of the cloud, and so going into 2021 and beyond we will see organisations building upon this momentum - moving to mature their cloud adoption strategies, kick-off their migration and modernisation initiatives and build out their internal capabilities. However, this doesn’t eliminate the fact that organisations now will struggle to attain the cloud talent required to build and maintain a credible cloud capability.
At Savant Technology Recruitment we offer a range of recruitment and search services across Cloud, Security & Architecture, Development & Testing and Infrastructure & Operations.
Our consultative approach seeks out to understand how we can help to bring you top talent within the marketplace from a permanent or contract basis so that you can achieve your IT transformational projects.
If you require further information please visit us via www.savantrecruitment.com or contact us directly via technology@savantrecruitment.com.
We look forward to hearing from you.
