Clinton Jacobs, 13 May 2019.
With the flurry of announcements of local cloud initiatives lately, especially the announcement the Standard Bank has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider, we were reflecting on the AWS re: Invent event in Las Vegas; the slew of announcements made, including a Standard Bank mention, and how it will be affecting us locally.
A big tip of the hat was made Hybrid Cloud environments with the announcement of AWS Outposts, the on-prem offering which promises to deliver “the same functionality across on-premises and the cloud to deliver a truly consistent hybrid experience”. This, along with all the other providers offering hybrid solutions as well, is another acknowledgment that the foreseeable cloud future will be a Hybrid one.
With the growing focus on Big Data and the value that can be obtained from it makes sense to get your data stored in the most effective way possible and with the various types of data being generated. Fit for purpose databases, optimized for the specific type of data such as time series data that IoT produces, will assist in the preparation and curation of big data for analytics.
As more companies realise they really want the services and solutions that IT delivers and they don’t need to own the underlying infrastructure. The trend is even toward not needing to configure and manage infrastructure, in essence, serverless for the user and having much smaller units of compute such as microservices on which to run your workload.
Artificial intelligence is starting to be baked into many solutions and the cloud is democratising AI and Machine learning, making it available to organisations who would not have been able to leverage it before due to the cost of development and infrastructure required but these are now available at the click of a button.
Last year was the tipping point for cloud computing locally and as companies seek to innovate and accelerate time to market. The old objections of connectivity and security have largely been dealt with and the race is on for service providers to offer a breadth of services, through a trusted partner network being able to deliver at speed.
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