InvestNow News 3rd Oct – Harbour – The move to the public cloud accelerates
30th Sep 2019 – Kevin Bennett
We try to attend at least one global technology conference each year to keep abreast of latest developments, market trends and hot topics. Over the last five years, speakers have focused on many exciting areas with large market growth potential (covering online migration and SaaS business models disrupting the old world), consumers going mobile, big data and Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IOT) to name but a few.
This year there was a more subdued feel to many presentations including references to slowing market growth rates (the fading “j” curve), rescaling business models for this new world (including “marketing optimization”) and searching for market adjacencies (the pivot). While no one was claiming the technology boom was over, the 10-year tailwind of online migration was no longer guaranteed to float all boats. Despite this more subdued backdrop, there was still considerable hype surrounding the opportunities regarding the public cloud providers.
We will review these key thematics in this paper.
The Public Cloud Debate
The term public cloud refers to a service provider making computing resources available to multiple parties via the internet. These resources may include storage capabilities, applications and/or virtual machines. The main appeal is the ability to buy services on a usage basis and avoid the capital costs of hardware and the associated maintenance. The larger players such as Amazon Website Services (AWS), Microsoft (owner of Azure) and Google provide hyperscale cloud offerings which provide additional services such as distributed sites, proprietary data analytic packages and scale economics. The picture below of one of Azure’s sites shows the scale of these farms, containing tens of thousands of servers.