Cloud has become ubiquitous across business and IT, and it’s fair to say that most strategies have large accommodations and aspirations to include cloud migration or scaling. 

Whether you’re already engaged with the technology and looking to further integrate its use in your operation or you’re just in the process of migration, it’s becoming ever more a minimum requirement to function effectively – no matter your business goals. 

According to recent Gartner research, global end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 20.7% to total $591.8 billion (£513.3bn) in 2023. 

This is an increase from $490.3bn (£425.3bn) in 2022 – higher than the 18.8% growth forecast for 2022. On top of this, Gartner predicts that 85% of businesses will be cloud-first by 2025 – a stat that Monk himself opens his talk with. 

Speaking to a packed room of IT leaders at this year’s DIGIT Expo  – which saw over 1,300 delegates descend on the EICC – Tom Monk, Director of Cloud Product Management at Naviste, looked at the current cloud landscape – identifying trends and strategies in line with the current demands with regards to successfully leveraging the technology. 

Cloud-first and analytics 

“There is no business strategy without a cloud strategy.” 

While in the past, this may have been considered a bold claim, the fact that the latest research shows that 85% of businesses will be cloud-first by 2025 goes a long way to validate Monk’s opening statement.  

Cloud has been transformational to many industries and as the technology continues to be widely adopted and iterated on, as such, a robust cloud strategy has never been more important, according to Monk. 

So how does he envision the next 12 months playing out in this space? 

“We’re going to see an acceleration of cloud-native projects,” this follows on from the earlier Gartner stat Monk mentioned about cloud-first – business and IT strategies have never been more closely linked. Cloud’s been an unarguable enabler for so many organisations, largely through the products and services offered by the hyper-scalers (AWS, Microsoft and Google). 

“Organisations are going to have to go all-in on the cloud to really gain the benefit,” says Monk. 

In his view, clinging on to legacy systems is only going to hold organisations back as it “slows down operations, deployment processes, those dependencies we have on prem are really cumbersome and difficult to manage.” 

Enterprises are expecting business outcomes that are becoming increasingly dependent on developing the cloud, as well as taking advantage of functionality that only exists in the cloud. 

On this, Monk says: “[this means] a higher possible TCO initially with migrating to the cloud, so companies are going to have to take a broader view of calculating their return on investment.  

“You can’t just compare the on prem costs with cloud cost, you have to really factor in those benefits into your understanding on costs.” 

Monk goes on to postulate that as more data moves to the cloud, in turn, more analytics will move to this space, becoming cloud-first.  

He expands, by saying: “Hyper-scalers are reacting to all of those workloads in the cloud for analytics. They’re producing lots of analytics tools and services for organisations to start using analytics in the cloud. 

“Organisations aren’t going to want to shift data between hyper-scalers and on premises, because that’s cumbersome and often quite costly. As such, they’re going to start to adopt those cloud native services for analytics. The really great thing about these tools is that they are for everyone.  

“Robotic process automation (RPA), AI, ML, those kinds of services, are now in the hands of non-data analysts. Previously that was a very steep learning curve, but now, these tools are for everyone, anyone can start to experiment with these tools and these working methods.” 

Cybersecurity automation 

We’re all aware of the cybersecurity skills shortage in the industry.  

According to Monk, this is not at an engineering level where the shortage is being felt, it’s all levels of an organisation.  

“Most organisations are not going to have someone in there driving that cybersecurity strategy,” says Monk.  

He adds: “We find so many organisations working in a tactical way to respond to security incidents or bringing in particular security solutions.  

“That creates lots of challenges for organisations, it’s going to drive costs up, because you’re going to have a diverse workforce who have used very different tools and services previously, aligned to a particular workload.” 

According to Monk, this means you can end up with unwieldy solutions to security problems that many of your staff simply won’t be able to manage, leading to gaps in your security posture. To combat this, Monk suggests that companies need to take a strategic approach in finding the right security strategy. 

To him, this involves “smart tool selection to ensure you’re implementing in a way that’s going to cover a broad range of use-cases and smart partnering and outsourcing to fill those gaps in your organisation.” 

Monk claims that to achieve a lot of this, automation will continue to “take centre stage.” 

Optimisation and Cost Control 

Cloud technology certainly isn’t new, in fact so much of what was once emerging is now at the heart of modern business operations, whether you’re talking about cloud, ML ops, AI or any kind of ‘transformation’ journey. We’re at a stage now where the challenge lies in the efficient implementation of technologies.  

It’s something Monk acknowledges, saying that it’s likely the crowd has “heard the word optimisation 100 times already today”. 

With regards to the cloud, claims that the freedom to build, develop and experiment is incredible and very beneficial. But it does have drawbacks, which means that operations can be challenging, and optimisation is difficult – all while maintaining spiralling costs. 

According to Gartner, through 2024, nearly all legacy applications will move to the cloud. 

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On this, Monk says: “When [these systems] move to the cloud, they will need to be optimised and become more cost effective. 

“Lots of organisations lift and shift into the cloud but maybe didn’t really consider their business driver. As such, they’re probably not getting the benefits they were hoping for and not delivering on the promise of the cloud around cost and optimisation and so on. 

This means that there’s plenty organisations that dip their toe into cloud then draw back and reconsider. 

Monk warns against this, saying: “Cost optimisation needs to be an ongoing process, cloud is not one and done, optimisation is an ongoing process.  

“Most organisations will refine or find they need some kind of dedicated expertise to help their organisation with Cloud costs. And finance isn’t just about controlling costs or stopping cost. It’s really about understanding costs, predicting costs and attributing value to your workloads.”