If 2019 was the year of the Cloud, the Coronavirus emergency has confirmed and highlighted the several benefits connected in particular to the possibility of eliminating assets and physical infrastructures, including to allow agile work and above all to grow according to new requirements.
“The Cloud is certainly the basis on which the future of the so-called new normal rests” states Francesco Bonfiglio, CEO of Engineering D.HUB. “Of all the enabling factors for Digital Transformation, the Cloud is the one we can define as fundamental”.
How widespread is the Cloud?
The latest data from the Cloud Transformation Observatory, promoted by the School of Management of the Politecnico of Milan, show that the Cloud is now one of the most important enabling technologies for the Digital Transformation of companies, so much so that in 2019 its market value rose to 2.77 billion euro, marking an 18% increase compared with last year. A growth that is also confirmed worldwide, given that according to Forrester, in 2019 the Cloud reached the value of 200 billion dollars and that in 2023 it could exceed 620 billion.
According to the Observatory of the Politecnico of Milan, the manufacturing sector, banks and TELCOs are the biggest investors in this technology. In relation to the Cloud’s different application methods (public, private and hybrid), 54% of organizations has a hybrid situation and 21% has a total Cloud approach.
The growing investments in the “Cloud” also find an explanation in the White Paper on Cloud just published by Engineering, where Bonfiglio states: “Companies need agility and flexibility to achieve the goals they have set themselves. The specific Cloud services range from strategic consultancy to technology management, from IT transformation to solution optimization. But it is only by creating intelligent ecosystems that an organization can succeed with its Cloud strategy”.
What are the cloud distribution models?
There are mainly three Cloud distribution models: IaaS, Infrastructure as a Service, which offers functional storage, network and processing services; PaaS, Platform as a Service, which covers a complete set of middleware services including application development platforms and integration features; the best known model SaaS, Software As A Service, namely software which can be accessed remotely as a service.
According to PoliMI data, infrastructural services outsourced to external suppliers grew by 11% in 2019, collecting a total investment of 661 million euro. Spending in PaaS also showed a growth of 38%, reaching 16% of the total volume of expenditure.
Hybrid or private Cloud?
As reported in the Engineering paper, we are witnessing the transition from the traditional system integration to a hybrid integration platform model, based on a multicloud approach capable of balancing past investments for adopting new business models with the digitization needs of the current key processes.
Combining the presence of multiple suppliers, bringing together public and private Cloud and On-premises services is one of the most felt needs by the PA and by companies even during the so-called “new normal”. A phase in which Engineering has released a new platform of Cloud services which, based on the synergies between different platforms, simplifies the access of companies and the PA to the various solutions, thanks to an extremely intuitive marketplace, accelerating the development of services by offering companies tools for governance and for a rapid interpretation of data in all its forms.
“Thanks to this solution – explains Bonfiglio – it is possible to govern the technologies, maximizing the advantages of the Cloud, freeing companies and the PA from the complexity that will continue to increase. We wanted to encapsulate the growing complexity of technologies within open and scalable platforms in order to refocus customers’ attention from technology to the design of new digital models of their business. Now more than ever there is a need not to miss the quantum leap towards the digital world made in the COVID emergency, by simplifying the approach of public and private organizations”.
5 good reasons to invest in Cloud technology
There are several reasons to benefit from the advantages of the Cloud. The most important are those related to the possibility of making the organization more agile and of being able to build, starting from this technology, an ecosystem of other technologies which can transform the company for the better. These are the main advantages identified by the White Paper:
- To adopt and rapidly expand technological progress without having to undertake costly migrations or lengthy updates: in this way companies can increasingly focus on their business and less on technology and Cloud services
- To migrate to the Cloud in a simple way thanks to the “as a service” paradigm, which allows organizations to operate in a world where problems concerning migration and updates are practically solved by using IaaS, PaaS and SaaS
- To embrace new business models which can evolve and expand
- To access, operate and develop digital market platforms, using the same frontier technologies as other competitors in order to guarantee competitiveness
- To ensure the visibility and integrity of data in real time, or almost so, in order to increasingly adopt a management method based on data analysis.
