Three Trends in Cloud Computing to Expect in 2020

A new year is upon us and that means it's time to look ahead to what's coming next. In cloud computing, organizations are going to be making adjustments in 2020 - to accommodate overstrained budgets, new regulations, and shifting technologies.

It will be a year of identifying what’s not working and moving toward the right solutions. Let’s take a look at three trends that will impact cloud computing across all industries in the coming year.

1. The Real Cost of Cloud: Reinventing Processes for Ephemeral Computing  
Organizations have made their move to the cloud – but with great agility comes great big costs. CFOs are frustrated with increasing cloud bills and CDOs are concerned that cloud expenditures aren’t translating into better performance. Meanwhile, CIOs are concerned that agility in compute is now leading to runaway costs in the cloud. Something’s got to give.

Organizations need to reinvent their processes to handle the public cloud. During this transformation, organizations will move some workloads back on-prem (particularly those that are sensitive), see reduced expenses, and they will be able to leverage the cloud in a more flexible and agile manner. Ephemeral computing will provide a solution in cases when cloud requirements can’t be accurately predicted or need to scale or shrink on demand.

2. Organizations to Struggle with CCPA Compliance: Fines to Fly
The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) will go into effect in January 2020, and while organizations are aware it’s coming, they are not aware of how much of their data – or what data – is not compliant. This means they also don’t know what fines they’ll be responsible for because of their lack of compliance. CSOs are concerned about the lack of authorization processes on public cloud data. This will cause tension between IT and business.

Brace yourself: organizations will realize that the public cloud has a huge gap in visibility and lack of preparedness for the CCPA. As such, we’ll see a lot of organizations in 2020 struggle to become compliant and have to pay a multitude of fines for CCPA. Additionally, to help organizations maintain compliance, we’ll see more cloud vendors working furiously to build products that meet the governance needs for public cloud, just like they have for regulations like GDPR. Watch for more CSOs to build a “define-once-enforce-anywhere” authorization policy infrastructure.

3. A Hybrid Strategy is the Key to Unlocking Shadow IT
For years, Lines of Business (LOB) have aggressively adopted public cloud SaaS technologies without involving IT, because it was too difficult for IT to find resources in the data center. Budget cycles were slow and resource allocations were extremely rigid. This led to LoBs spinning up their own IT operations, also known as Shadow IT. But, with technologies like kubernetes and openshift being adopted widely, IT can start saying yes.

To bring some order to Shadow IT, we’ll see organizations integrate hybrid strategies that allow the admin team to monitor chargebacks to each business unit and flexibly identify the right location and lifecycle for data and applications. Given that data centers will increasingly behave more like public cloud services, IT will be able to quickly move users between data centers and the public cloud.

Unlike a multitude of point solutions on top of each other, causing distributed data and IT workloads, a hybrid approach provides more flexibility and centralized control. This gives all different teams and personas a compute environment, without removing the single source of truth.

The Year of Flexible Deployment
Ultimately, 2020 will be a year for business needs to be fulfilled by dynamic deployments across infrastructures – from the public cloud to private cloud deployments to edge computing – utilizing centralized governance to make regulatory compliance straightforward. Solutions that allow workloads to be deployed anywhere will be critical for the adjustments organizations will be making this year.

Anupam Singh is Chief Customer Officer at Cloudera.