Reflections of the Past Make Way for 20/20 Vision

2019 was a year of change on a personal and professional front. As I reflect, the power of change, our ability to adapt to change and the energy it takes continues to amaze me. I changed jobs - went to a new team, new office, new set of customers and had to spend time and energy to adapt to new ways (the book First 90 days helped !). As I meet our customers who are on multi cloud journey, it is clear the ways to procure and consume infrastructure and application services are changing leading to new neighbourhoods, new relationships and new techniques to learn. This leads me to share where I think the market is heading and here are my predictions for the year.

Cloud Trends Defining 2020

By now, most organizations in Asia Pacific (APAC) should recognize that their digital transformation journey is key to maintaining a competitive advantage in business as we move into 2020.

However, digital transformation is a rapidly evolving concept that requires organizations to move away from ineffective workflows, embrace modern mindsets, and adopt new business models. It also calls for the ability to manage the increasingly complex IT environments while faced with tight IT budgets, talent shortage, and fast-changing market demands.

Here are three trends we foresee taking off in 2020 that could shape the C-suite’s strategy to overcome those challenges and capture the opportunities:

Multi-cloud to become the standard

Multi-cloud will become the preferred IT foundation for more organizations as they seek to become more agile to keep up with digital disruption. In fact, over 65 percent of enterprises in Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) is expected to use multiple cloud services and platforms by 2021.

For multi-cloud to deliver value, it needs to be integrated, support DevOps, and scale services to meet variable workload demands. Recognizing this, some cloud giants have introduced solutions – such as AWS Outpost, Azure Arc, and Google Anthos – that can ensure consistent development and operations experience across on-premise, private and public clouds. As the competition among cloud hyperscalers to become the provider of choice heats up, we believe that more of such unified, hybrid/multi-cloud tools will be rolled out next year. Those solutions will leverage Kubernetes to provide the scalability and portability needed to effectively support the digital enterprise.

With a wide range of choices available, organizations will need to carefully select the right cloud platform and tool for different workloads instead of taking a one-size-fits-all approach to cloud deployment. Only by doing so will they be able to accelerate the value of their multi-cloud with an eye to deliver the desired business outcomes with optimized investment.

IoT and edge will move from hype to reality thanks to 5G and cloud

We anticipate an increase in the number of IoT and edge computing deployments in some parts of APAC in 2020, driven by the commercial availability of 5G and cloud adoption. To date, South Korea and China have rolled out 5G networks, while Australia, Japan, and Singapore plans to do so next year.

GSMA anticipates that 5G will contribute to almost US$900 billion to the region’s economy over the next 15 years. It will be beneficial especially for the manufacturing, retail, transportation, and government sectors, as they adopt IoT to become more connected. 5G’s low-latency, high bandwidth network will enable far-away sensors to instantly share updates about the connected devices, therefore enabling real-time processing. This will, in turn, drive the demand for edge computing as data can be immediately processed near where the data is generated, instead of in a centralized data-processing warehouse. Edge computing can also help reduce operational costs. It reduces the bandwidth needs as data is mostly processed locally, and only the relevant data gets transmitted to the central data repository.

The benefits of deploying IoT, edge, 5G and cloud technologies are exemplified in the case of smart cities. With edge computing, a connected traffic light can analyze the data collected by sensors to determine real-time traffic flow. It can then quickly transmit that information to other traffic lights and autonomous cars in the vicinity via 5G and cloud to coordinate the flow of traffic – such as changing the duration of the green light or suggesting a different route to the car – to ease congestion. As more Asian cities ramp up their smart city efforts and organizations become more connected, we are excited to see many other use cases for edge computing (supported by 5G and cloud) in time to come.

Cloud risks might be closer to home than you think

Misconfigurations and the challenge of managing identities and access in the multi-cloud environment will continue to present threats for companies next year.

Despite its benefits, multi-cloud also opens more doors to security risks. Besides providing a wider potential attack surface for hackers, multi-cloud can also cause organizations to be more vulnerable to insider threats. For instance, the increased complexity of the IT environment due to multi-cloud adoption might lead to poor configuration management. Having more business users using the cloud also poses a challenge as not everyone fully understands cloud security risks and know how to mitigate them. A recent report by Symantec found that some users may exhibit risky behaviours in the cloud such as oversharing cloud files or not storing sensitive data properly in the cloud – all of which may lead to data loss.

To minimize cloud risks, organizations will need to have a multi-layered security strategy that can provide detection, response and remediation when their IT environment is in jeopardy. Their Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) will also need to work across more departments in 2020 to ensure that security is not overlooked when innovative solutions and new business processes are introduced.