Cloud’s meteoric rise to become the dominant system for IT infrastructure has only been accelerated by the pandemic. The capacity of the cloud to rapidly run workloads with flexibility and scale is something that is rarely matched by onsite IT infrastructure; a capability that has become more essential during the pandemic induced changes to working patterns and business operations. Indeed, according to Flexera’s 2021 State of the Cloud Report, 90 percent of firms slightly or significantly increased their cloud usage due to the pandemic.
Cloud’s meteoric rise to become the dominant system for IT infrastructure has only been accelerated by the pandemic. The capacity of the cloud to rapidly run workloads with flexibility and scale is something that is rarely matched by onsite IT infrastructure; a capability that has become more essential during the pandemic induced changes to working patterns and business operations. Indeed, according to Flexera’s 2021 State of the Cloud Report,90 percent of firms slightly or significantly increased their cloud usage due to the pandemic. As cloud services’ dominance looks set to continue, businesses are utilizing cloud platforms to drive innovation in emerging technologies. Businesses can now scale up their operations in areas like artificial intelligence with ease, allowing them to tap into fluctuating customer desires so as to deliver tangible value to the business. The development of container technology has been a key driver in enabling this new cloud-native world. Containers enhance cloud flexibility, by allowing developers to package up software code and easily test, deploy, and run applications that are needed for businesses functionality. The portability of containers also allows workloads to be moved across IT infrastructure with ease. Kubernetes is the primary developer tool for supporting developers to manage and optimize these containerized workloads, helping businesses to scale. Research from Civo found that 90 percent of enterprises using Kubernetes are running it in the cloud. Despite the growing use of cloud technology, costs and service charges continue to be a significant check on the ability of businesses to use cloud to scale up and innovate. Cloud Spend Gartner predicts worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services will grow from 23.1 percent in 2021 to $332.3 billion, up from $270 billion in 2020, representing unseen levels of investment in cloud services. Alongside this record investment in cloud, user overspend on cloud services is rife.
