There is no ‘future of cloud’: why cloud technology is inseparable from our daily lives

Transforming society

What is the future of our society? What does it look like and what does cloud have to do with it? Cloud will be a huge driving force in the futurisation of towns, workplaces, institutions and people, because it will provide the digital infrastructure of tomorrow’s smart cities (where an estimated 68% of the world’s population will live by 2050 ¹ ).

Our cities are becoming smarter, but each new connected device creates data which has to be stored and analysed. It will only be possible to support connected technology at this scale, with a combination of edge technology and cloud computing. With this digital infrastructure in place, smart elevators and parking lots, driverless cars and drone taxis, trains and subways, farms and power plants will all be part of the functioning fabric of everyday life.

The cloud will also support emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and help them to adapt to new platforms such as mobile. As an example, while AI has already found its way onto mobile phones, these devices contain lots of unstructured data such as emails, text messages and photos. Analysing unstructured data takes time and processing power that most smartphones don’t have locally. With cloud powering the computing, we can expect our phones to become even smarter.

Transforming business

Removing barriers to innovation 

Cloud has become indispensable for businesses. One of the key reasons for this is how it has impacted innovation. Without the need for physical infrastructure, and the operational and labour costs that come with it, cloud technology removes the typical financial barriers to innovation and digital transformation. Smaller businesses who would traditionally struggle to come up with the upfront investment required for on-premise implementations, can access new technology through cloud delivery models.

Meanwhile, cloud has also reduced the risks associated with investment. Expensive, rigid contracts can be a barrier for many smaller companies. The scalability of cloud computing means offerings can grow or shrink back depending on the needs of the company, helping to manage costs and financial risk. These flexible, cloud-based models will continue to grow in popularity. Within the past five years alone, the economy for subscription-based business models has risen by over 100% a year ² , driving 90% of enterprises to transition or consider transitioning to this kind of set up ³ .

Cloud computing also encourages innovation because its speed makes it easy to experiment with new ideas, as feedback can be gathered quickly. If a strategy isn’t working it can be corrected quickly, rather than waiting until it has failed to take stock and learnings. This allows businesses to innovate more freely. Meanwhile, if businesses spot opportunities within the market, a cloud infrastructure allows them to respond and harness these opportunities more rapidly. With so much opportunity in the cloud, businesses will continue to transition, with the worldwide public cloud services market projected to grow 29.2% between 2021 and 2026 ⁴ .

Data deluge

An irony of all of this is that the more we use cloud solutions, the more we need them. The so-called ‘data deluge’ can be attributed to how much we access cloud-based services in our daily lives. Using online systems, social networking, sharing videos, capturing traffic flow, collaborating with colleagues – these all add up to vast quantities of data each person and each business generates for themselves and it doesn’t even touch on the data created by healthcare, education, science and the military. All this information needs computing power to manage, store and analyse it – for which we need cloud.

This is why talking about the future of cloud is so erroneous – what we really need to be talking about is the future of society and the future of business. The future of our cities, our workspaces and institutions are heavily dependent on cloud technology and this will only become truer, as more services go serverless and digital infrastructures become more advanced. It is not enough to say that the future of cloud is heading in a certain direction. Rather, it would be more correct to make predictions about the future of humanity, society and business and how cloud technology will rise to meet those challenges.