Tech Giants Rat Race for Cloud Solutions

Cloud computing is the near future, where tech giants like Google, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS) grow their cloud solutions and services to encourage adoption in enterprises, institutions and even government organizations.

To penetrate more into the market shares of cloud services, companies such as AWS, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Alibaba are in fierce competition. Multiple cloud solutions have been developed such as public, private, hybrid on one side and SaaS, PaaS and IaaS (Software as Services, Platform as Service, Infrastructure as Services respectively) on the other side. According to Gartner, in 2017 cloud computing infrastructure is a service market worth US$23.5 billion.

The following are the possible reasons for tech giants to enhance cloud services.

Huge Growth in Cloud Services

Enterprises are already battling along to get the first mover advantage in cloud. The flexibility and saving offered by cloud solutions give the firms unprecedented growth. An example would be, US largest retailer Walmart inked a five-year deal with Microsoft to use its Azure cloud computing platform, machine learning tools and Office 365. One of the crucial factors of choosing Microsoft Azure was Walmart's decision to be independent of Amazon Services, who is their biggest competitor in the retail space.

Cloud Services with Increased Storage

As the enterprises grow big, so is the need for more space in cloud solutions. This demand from the industry pushes the cloud service providers to deliver more data centers with huge storage facilities. Such a scenario is experienced in New Zealand, where the country wanted to save data of digital lives, the services were provided by Amazon Web Service. For this specific requirement, Amazon bought capacity on a new Hawaiki cable connecting New Zealand to Australia and the US. It has data centers in both countries and helped Amazon and other data hosts to build their own data centers, thus increasing the storage capacity.

Shift from Cloud Adoption to Cloud Optimisation

As more and more enterprises adopt the cloud services, the service provides an incline to optimize the solutions rather than harping on the adoption. But the increase in cloud adoption leads cyber attackers targeting cloud infrastructure. There is a high probability of more individual and state-sponsored attack aimed at undermining the security of cloud infrastructure. In 2017, the IT industry faced severe cyber-attacks such as WannaCry Ransomware, US's CIA vault 7 hack and Equifax data breach.

The Era of the Internet of Things

As more and more enterprise and organizations start adopting cloud solutions, more data will be generated. Also, the data stored will be quickly accessed by the employees of businesses who adopted cloud solutions. Since there a growing demand for cloud solutions, the cloud system eventually needs to collect data from millions of devices in the enterprises. This data can be utilized in artificial intelligence and machine learning tools that help businesses to make a sense of data they have collected to build new applications and services. The two types of strategies observed are that start-ups and digital companies begin their life with cloud since the cost of developing their own infrastructure is huge. Whereas tech giants are taking cloud-based approach to make the best use of their artificial intelligence-powered tools.