While we are already familiar with the importance of cloud technologies in IT companies, new market demands may emerge this year.

We are living in a dynamically changing world. It is true that market demands fuel innovation and brings new shifts in business paradigms, which is why the COVID pandemic acted as a major catalyst for disruption in 2020. And amid the uncertain times, cloud technologies had come through to support businesses worldwide by providing them with much-needed resilience and agility. In technical parlance, cloud computing is the delivery of on-demand computing services over the internet and on a pay-as-you-go basis.

These services can range from cloud applications to data processing to data storage. Cloud also offers flexible IT assets that make speedy time to market, business model transformation, and the ability to experiment, neglecting all stress possible.  Today, it has come a long way through a different number of phases including edge, serverless, grid and utility computing, application service provision and software-as-a-service (SaaS). This year, cloud purists have also forecast witnessing new trends in the cloud adoption. Let's have a look at some of the emerging cloud technologies and services that are anticipated to dominate 2021.

Cloud Migration Services

The constant appetite for assimilating data to make data-driven decisions and extract relevant insights is driving companies to opt for platforms that can help them achieve the same. As pandemic forced companies to rethink their IT strategy and embrace digital technologies, migration to cloud platforms gained momentum to sustain work from home culture and cater to data storage demands. This year will also witness the continuation of enterprise software tools to cloud too.

In its latest market survey, Gartner predicts that the worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 18.4% in 2021 to a total of US$304.9 billion — which is up from US$257.5 billion in 2020.

Since the cloud migration services market is becoming popular among SMEs and giant enterprises, cloud vendors will come up with new recompense schemes, to encourage more cloud migration services. Furthermore, owing to cloud features like pay-as-you-go, delivery of on-demand scalable cloud models acts as an impetus for companies looking for cost efficiency and business dexterity.

Hybrid Cloud

Last year at the IBM Media eXchange 2020, on September 3rd, 2020, IBM revealed in a study that hybrid cloud computing provides services 2.5 times faster than the single cloud. It also stated that by 2023, there would be an estimated increase in the share of spend on hybrid, rising from 42% to 49%.The study named The hybrid cloud platform advantage- The India point of view is authored by Vishwanath Ramaswamy, Anil Bhasker, Hybrid Cloud Leader IBM India/ South Asia and Anthony Marshall, Senior Research Director, IBM Institute for Business Value.

Meanwhile, a new report by Nutanix, Inc., a cloud computing company, reveals that 63% of India's enterprises have increased their investment in hybrid cloud as a direct result of the pandemic, compared to just 46% globally. The report also noted that 97% of respondents believed hybrid cloud was the correct architecture for their organizations, which is again higher than the global average of 87%. Another report from Nutanix, found that 79% of UK respondents consider hybrid the ideal operating model.

The best characteristic of hybrid cloud is that it is not too costly, nor labor intensive. This means possibility of cloud migration without refactoring, data center consolidation, as well as seasonal and cyclical capacity utilization. Further, with hybrid cloud, enterprises can deploy and manage virtual machine–based applications with containerized cloud-native applications, on the same platform, while retaining the ability to leverage the public cloud for failover situations. So, it is safe to assume that organizations will continue to formalize hybrid cloud architecture in 2021 too.

Cloud Native Services

While cloud migration works for emulating old-world applications and architectures, for reaping benefits for new cloud technologies, companies must adopt 'cloud native' mindset. Cloud-native is an approach to building and running applications that exploits the advantages of the cloud computing delivery model. Offering benefits like higher agility, speed to innovation and lower IT costs, cloud native is the future of cloud application development. These apps are modular, unlike monoliths architecture of on-premises apps. Moreover, cloud native development is appropriate for both public and private clouds.

Typically, cloud-native architectures are developed based on cloud-native services, such as containers, microservices, Service Mesh, and Serverless. It also incorporates the concepts of DevOps, and continuous delivery.

Cloud native helps organizations by removing constraints and shortening the path to business value. It manages cloud security and compliance and also provides real-time notifications on detection of problem areas. Further, cloud native products are continuous, comprehensive and offers automated yet accurate risk assessment. As 2021, will see cloud native products reshape the entire lifecycle of software development and promote the transformation and upgrading of the information industry, it will also become new interface for cloud computing.

Microservices and Containers

With widespread usage of cloud native platforms, it is obvious that microservices and containers will also rise in demand. Microservice is an approach to software design where an application is broken down into a distributed array of loosely coupled services. These single-function services are built by small teams, independent from other functions, and communicating only through public interfaces. Being a popular choice for running microservices applications, containers achieve operating system virtualization by "containing" only what's required by an application for autonomous operation. These can be either executables, code, libraries, or files. Besides, each microservice's data is self-contained and immutable, which implies that they are not updated but rather replaced, keeping only the API. This year there will be significant increases in the new microservices which are deployed by the developers.

Owing to its scalability, in terms of both speed and agility, microservices are drivers of new increased adoption of cloud native. By running microservices in separate containers, they can all be deployed independently. Moving to container based microservices will result in finer-grained execution environments, better component cohabitation due to permit application isolation along with faster initialization and execution. Therefore, with developers planning for long-term usability and scalability of their application, in recent times, the popularity of microservices in containers will gain.