What is the future for the cloud?

AI will be important as the cloud keeps growing, but service providers must change their business model

The future of the cloud, like its present, will not be defined by a single use-case or advancement. Instead artificial intelligence, blockchain and other developments will shape the technology, agreed a panel at Computing's annual Cloud & Infrastructure Summit.

Chris Grundy, a director at Cundall, feels that "software-defined" (smart) buildings are a natural environment for the cloud to be used in in the near future; although that will lead to even higher data generation. Ben Naylor, technology transformation manager at Belron International, said that datacentres will become increasingly important because of the increasing amount of big data that is being generated; and Paul Murray, UK&Ireland software architect leader at IBM Software, told the audience that blockchain will be important to make the cloud data-aware.

AI will be necessary to process big data, said Murray, although he admitted that there are "a few more steps to go before we can say we've made a major breakthrough."

Grundy said that AI is "central" to cloud growth. Currently only about 55 per cent of the world uses the cloud; there will be even more data as that approaches full penetration, and it's just too much for humans to make sense of. As the complexity of that data and networks grows, AI will be necessary to control them.

Despite the rising importance of artificial intelligence, Grundy insisted that the IT department is here to stay. "[IT workers] can deal with technical debt and analyse how people work, how they can be more productive. The headcount [of the department] might change, but not the number of overall people working in IT; they will go to service providers. The IT department is here to stay, but needs to evolve."

What is the future?

The future of the cloud could be serverless, said Naylor. Echoing comments made by several other speakers at the Summit, he said, "At the moment people are restricting themselves to one service provider - usually because the process of getting starting is painful... [But] a serverless architecture - being able to move between providers - will come around quickly."

Vendor lock-in should not go hand-in-hand with the cloud - as some CIOs have mentioned to Computing in the past. Naylor said that he loves the idea of having "a third-party broker for your applications, who can move them between clouds depending on market conditions - no agreement with providers needed."

Murray thinks that freely switching between service providers is not likely to happen in the near future. In the short term, he thinks that businesses should focus on one simple question: "Is the cloud saving me money?" Brokerage and orchestration will be key to the use of multi-cloud environments, and companies must be aware of this.