The Top 5 Cloud Trends to Look Out For in 2020

At Wasabi, we pride ourselves on being cloud storage experts. Looking forward to what the future of the cloud storage industry might hold is part of what keeps us ahead of the curve. As such, it is a tradition for us to offer our cloud predictions at the end of every year. Here are five cloud topics we think will be big news in 2020.

1) Public Clouds

There are now two kinds of public clouds: First, the hyperscalers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft who want you to use all their hundreds of cloud services. Then there are the bare metal public clouds that relieve you from having to run your own hardware, but still let you have total control over software and applications. Both have advantages and disadvantages. But both will continue to thrive because baby-sitting your own in-house data center is expensive and rarely does running your own data center give you much of an edge in the market.

The Public Cloud will continue to grow as business owners resist further monetary investments in their own private data centers. Buying and baby-sitting a roomful of servers can be a pain in the neck and often tangential to a company's core business. As a result, savvy executives should look at outsourcing this hardware infrastructure to the cloud in 2020.

2) Private Clouds

Hyperscalers like AWS will alienate many of the companies they would like to have as customers when those companies realize they can outsource their existing physical infrastructure while maintaining control over how their data is used. Many companies—be it retailers, film production studios, or grocery stores—may find themselves competing directly with their cloud provider. Hosting data or other cloud services in AWS is putting money in your competitor’s pocket. Meanwhile, some cloud services, notably storage, will blur the lines between private and public cloud as the world starts to understand the paradigm of data storage as just a commodity, like electricity or bandwidth. In 2020, executives should investigate how their company’s data is being used by their storage providers and consider alternatives.

3) Hybrid Clouds

For a variety of reasons (speed, data sovereignty laws, privacy), many applications still need to run either entirely on-premises or on some combination of proprietary gear plus cloud. Most large organizations still have enormous IT footprints with hundreds or thousands of servers to back up and, increasingly, those servers are getting backed up to the cloud. The “hybrid cloud,” will reign for years with the balance changing slowly to favor the cloud over time. Executives with on-prem data should make sure they have a hybrid cloud backup strategy in place in order to maximize redundancy and increase efficiency.

4) The rise of multi-cloud

Hyperscalsers like AWS claim to “do it all” when it comes to cloud. In 2020, cloud customers will proclaim, “I want to pick the best storage, the best AI software, the best CPUs, the best CDN, etc. I want it to all work together.” Currently, large cloud providers like Amazon and Microsoft have incompatible APIs which prevents customers from bringing any business to a competitor. In the coming year, standards will emerge so that it will be much easier for SIs and CSPs to put it all together for their customers. Executives should look at each piece of their data system—storage, compute, content delivery, AI—and make sure they’re getting the best service for the amount they’re paying.

5) Importance of Channels

As customers have more choices among cloud vendors, more expertise will be needed to guide their choices. Channels can become experts at cloud-based implementations. As much as some of the hyperscalers would like to cut out the middlemen and deal directly with the customer, increasingly the need for multi-cloud strategies will empower the channel partners. The channel grew up selling and managing “boxes” from Dell, Cisco, HP, and many others. In the future, they will make their money by selling and managing software and services from Azure, Wasabi, Veeam, and other non-hardware products.

Undoubtedly the new year will bring new innovations to the cloud storage industry. At Wasabi, we will continue to evolve to meet the demands of our customers and new market forces while continuing to deliver low-cost, high-performance cloud storage.