Cloud Trends Shaping The Future Of Business

By Richard Vester, Chief Executive – iOCO Cloud

Gartner predicts that 25% of organisations will have experienced significant dissatisfaction with their cloud adoption by 2028 due to unrealistic expectations, suboptimal implementation, and/or uncontrolled costs. Gartner also predicts 50% of cloud compute resources will be devoted to AI workloads by 2029. We see similar trends emerging in South Africa today.

Modernisation and AI

AI is a top priority as organisations look to understand how generative AI can actually support their strategies. It is clear that embracing AI will require more compute resources initially, before its benefits, such as automation and optimisation, reduce operational costs.

Another very large trend is organisations modernising applications. With 60% of organisations running over half of their workloads in the cloud, companies are looking to modernise their applications in order to consume the best of breed services from within the public cloud.

FinOps for cost management

Potentially the biggest emerging cloud trend is the adoption of FinOps to optimise cloud environments and ensure organisations invest in the right services. Larger enterprises such as financial institutions are now building FinOps practices, while mid-size businesses have yet to develop this capability.

It’s a complex practice aimed at reducing wasteful expenditure or oversubscriptions,  moving compute and services around to improve efficiencies in your cloud deployment. FinOps must look at the needs across the organisation and the multiple personas within it – from CIO, CTO, and financial leaders through to business analysts and individuals.

FinOps must work with technical and financial tooling and understand the underlying architecture of the cloud. Moreover, FinOps teams need to comprehend the different types of cloud services, the costs and benefits attached to them and the impact of moving between services. Importantly, they must stay abreast of constant changes in the hyperscale environment – many services and possibly thousands of variations are launched annually, and each variation could impact services and costs.

Expert support for optimal cloud

Cloud adoption is a journey.  It is not a one size fits all product delivered in a box, so businesses need to examine their strategy, and understand the applications and  platforms linked to them before they start making decisions around where they wish to go with digital transformation and cloud uptake.

This is why iOCO’s Cloud Services portfolio has been designed to solve business challenges while enabling organisations to keep pace with global trends and optimise their cloud environments for their needs. Focusing on three key areas: visibility, control, and security, we work with customers to understand their existing infrastructure, architecture, and applications, and then advise on business strategy to ensure their transformation goals are achieved.

We take away the complexity that makes the cloud such a challenge for most companies, turning it into a business conversation where customers can control what different divisions are doing and deploying. We architect best of breed services, strategically modernising the environment and enabling visibility while helping to reduce costs in the long term.

Our FinOps managed service expertise is built on years of experience, our work with engineers and hyperscalers across EMEA, and our experience in running our own cloud platforms for over 13 years. Our ability to operate across all the different cloud providers, along with our advanced AWS partner status and certifications, ensures we can guarantee optimal results and cost savings of anywhere between 20% to 30%.

For optimal, fit for purpose cloud environments, organisations need to work with specialists like iOCO. We  understand the end-to-end landscape and what different technologies offer. iOCO provides expertise across the cloud – from infrastructure and security all the way through to application modernisation. This ensures that cloud adoption leads to business success.

https://ioco.tech/