2016 – The Year Belongs To Enterprise Apps And Cloud Computing

2016 is the year that is going to bring about some significant changes in terms of enterprise apps and cloud computing. You may think that people have been talking about this sea of change for quite some time. So, why now? Why this year?

To begin with, let’s go through some of the statistics sourced from the internet:

Gartner predicts the use of connected things in the enterprise will drive $868B in spending in 2016.
Deloitte Global predicts that in 2016 more than 80 of the world’s 100 largest enterprise software companies will integrate cognitive technologies into their products. This is a 25% increase on the prior year.
The greater cloud market will hit $118 billion, growing to over $200 billion by 2018.
Encryption as a service, powered by the cloud, from a growing list of vendors, will be used for over 80% of regulated data by 2018.

Having said that, what are the upcoming trends that we are about to witness this year in terms of enterprise apps and cloud computing?

Enterprises will aim for speedier internet performance

Enterprises handle numerous quantities of Big Data on a regular basis. But are they equipped with the data connectivity or say, internet performance that allows them to handle data of such massive scale? Probably not. This is where the year will set enterprises’ focus on speedier internet performance that allows them to quickly analyze Big Data and arrive at a solution in real-time. Think of all the benefits this will bring to the table, right from bettering customer service to enhancing the existing bottom lines.

Teridion, an Israeli-American startup promises to bring about a revolution by drastically accelerating the internet performance. The company has secured $20 million in funding is close to releasing a cloud-based solution that will boost up internet speeds. It aims to achieve this goal by optimizing traffic across global backbone networks.

The company’s founder and CEO Elad Rave cited that their technology will be capable of delivering internet performance, which is going to be 20 times faster than that of the speed all businesses are experiencing at present.

With more companies and advanced technologies like this, speedier data will definitely deliver value to enterprises.

Security will be under the scanner

A recent report says that as many as 86% of the applications on the web faced serious issues with authentication, access control, and confidentiality. And more than half of the applications suffer from common breaches, which include but are not limited to Cross-Site Scripting, SQL Injection, etc.

In fact, 2015 saw some of the biggest security flaws in the recent years. The Ashley Madison hack, VTech hackIRS data breach, made to the headlines and sent all those affected by it, in a frenzy!

It is most likely, that even 2016 may bring forth more news related to data breaches but someone has to learn from the past.

Security will definitely be on the top of the priority stack for enterprises and they will look forward to availing the best security solutions available to outdo hackers.

One such solution is Machine learning. When implemented in the best way possible, Machine learning can help enterprises to at least prevent some of the deadliest hacks or security threats in the near future.

Here are some of the steps that are being taken by various organizations in this direction.

TensorFlow, Google’s machine learning system was released to open source and consists of a standalone library and associated tools, tutorials, and examples under the Apache 2.0 license.
• Microsoft also released its Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit to the developer community. It is available on GitHub.
IBM announced that its machine learning engine SystemML for Apache Spark won acceptance into the Apache Incubator program.
• Even Intel forayed in this domain with its open source-built Trusted Analytics Platform, more commonly known as TAP.
• Social Networking giant Facebook’s FAIR (Facebook AI Research) said it would release its server hardware design that’s been optimized for machine learning to open source.

Hybrid Cloud will gain momentum

Another important trend that will capture everyone’s attention is the adoption of the hybrid cloud. Enterprises will be now able to deploy workloads in different environments with hybrid clouds and reach new levels of efficiency.

For them, although large public cloud providers will continue to be the location for external workloads, but then, a significant portion of the workload will also remain on-premise. Here is a list of some more cloud trends that we are most likely to see this year, adopted by enterprises.

With big names in hybrid cloud computing such as HP, AWS, DELL and Microsoft, the competition is definitely going to surge ahead, which is of course, a good news for enterprises which can capitalize on the best hybrid cloud model.

And so will serverless frameworks

Cloud computing took giant strides in 2015 and played a huge role when it came to hosting enterprise apps and data. This year, there will definitely be more improvements in this direction with the introduction of new technologies.

One of the most innovative technologies in this direction is serverless frameworks. Associated with AWS Lambda, these offer a completely new way to deploy code to the cloud. The main highlights of these frameworks are –

Unforeseen agility – It leaves it up to the developers to decide how they would like to containerize their logic.

Serverless – As the name itself suggests, serverless frameworks are void of any server scaling or management. It is all dealt with by Amazon, giving developers the chance to focus solely on the building of their products.

Enterprise apps are still going to be on the rise

Enterprise apps are on the rise and the trend will definitely not subside in 2016.

IOT will be a key factor when it comes to developing enterprise apps and will be ingrained in the same. It will be crucial in the development of apps in verticals such as automotive, payments, healthcare and energy. Although it is still at its nascent stage, once leveraged, the power of IOT can work wonders for enterprises.

With BYOD becoming increasingly popular across various organizations, we can also look forward to more apps that are developed for various device platforms including tablets and wearables.

We can also expect to see more app designs, which are optimized for the cloud. Therefore, enterprise app developers need to make sure that their apps align themselves to the cloud infrastructure adopted by the enterprise in question.

To Conclude

Massive innovations in the technology sphere and cloud computing are going to usher in good news for enterprises in 2016. By keeping all the constraints, especially security in the forefront, the year is going to be the one dotted with numerous milestones for enterprises. What is your view on the upcoming trends for enterprise apps and cloud computing? Share your views with us via your comments.

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