In 2019, we can expect the cloud industry to continue to thrive – with impressive cloud adoption across all industries, accompanied by an improvement in solutions and integrated data tools to best meet user needs. These advancements will substantially enhance operations in the cloud, leading it to ultimately become the preferred platform for all enterprise applications.

Looking ahead, we will see companies move beyond standard adoption, and instead begin to redefine how they use cloud as a key part of their business strategy. The cloud space has a rich history of continual improvement and is evidently getting more competitive, with three trends likely to emerge in this new year.

Multi-cloud dominance across enterprise 

Cloud environments today come in many shapes and sizes, from many different providers. As such, multicloud deployment will likely continue to be used as a key strategy, bringing the ability to pick and choose solutions to the organisation as leaders seek to avoid dependence on a singular cloud provider. This flexibility means that companies can structure workloads into separate environments sorted by their different requirements.

However, as organisations look to deploy diverse clouds and operations within a single heterogeneous infrastructure, leaders will need a clear strategy and visibility into how these pieces will work together in order to avoid creating more silos.

There are multiple challenges when expanding the multicloud strategy, including security, governance, service integration and financial costs. Businesses can adhere to this by outlining the best practices for efficient management of their specific company’s culture and cloud environment. In 2019, we will see multicloud reach a tipping point and providers that are able to embrace this culture will be able to build the best custom approach that fundamentally presents the greatest offering.

Blurring of the line between public and private cloud

2019 could be the year and turning point for organisations to migrate critical workloads to public cloud as business leaders strive to stay ahead of the demands of digital transformation, including faster access to emerging technologies, on-demand capacity and unlimited scalability. And with the public cloud entering the data center through solutions like Amazon Relational Database Service, the rigid line between public and private cloud is slowly being diminished.

So with the cloud world no longer being simple black or white, how will we adjust to this new ‘grey scale’ commoditised cloud world? Fundamentally, APIs and control plans will become increasingly more important, and strategies will need to focus on when and where streams are being run and who is managing them. IT management will need to have a clear plan in determining what should be outsourced and create a contingency plan for when adjustments need to be made.

Governance and agility in opposition

IT operations is structured by a set of corporate guidelines which must be adapted and monitored within a cloud landscape, ensuring compliance with operational standards of high efficiency and security. And in the cloud and IT industry, governance is intertwined with business goals and policies, as companies strive to move forward and evolve.

However, cloud-based services are advancing at an accelerated rate and have exceeded the capabilities of traditional management solutions, creating roadblocks on the journey to innovation. New cloud technologies are continuing to change the nature of services, as today’s landscape no longer considers a single infrastructure to be sufficient. As organisations use multiple clouds simultaneously and deploy on-premise solutions, data needs to be maintained and shared across multiple different infrastructures, making IT governance increasingly more difficult to accomplish.

2019 will see governance and agility come head to head, and automation will be key in implementing a sound governance strategy that both simplifies operations and speeds up decision making. Managing large-scale cloud environments is no easy feat and automating policies will be essential in ensuring optimal operation of cloud infrastructure.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.