It is truly up in the cloud, atleast for the IT world. Cloud infrastructure has come a long way and experts say that it is only the beginning. From a storage solution the technology has become the cornerstone of IT as corporations adopt automation & AI led solutions. In 2024 alone the global expenditure on cloud services is pushing a $600 Bn mark and poised to grow even more in 2025.
It is truly up in the cloud, atleast for the IT world. Cloud infrastructure has come a long way and experts say that it is only the beginning. From a storage solution the technology has become the cornerstone of IT as corporations adopt automation & AI led solutions. In 2024 alone the global expenditure on cloud services is pushing a $600 Bn mark and poised to grow even more in 2025.
Harsha Penubadi, leading DevOps engineer and cloud expert scratches the surface of this explosive growth and throws light on its evolution, future and its significance in this complex and fast evolving business landscape. He stated,” What started as a dumping ground for data and an easy offload tool but now it is the backbone of modern IT. The journey has been quite long, yet very interesting. As organizations struggled with the overhead from physical infrastructure to virtualize their servers it paved the way for the platform to turn into a service and eventually initiate full-stack migrations, where companies could deploy entire tech stacks within the cloud, integrating databases and containerization tools”.
Now and Then
An elated Penubadi further added, “Today, cloud infrastructure has evolved to include entire orchestration and management layers. It is a scalable tool and has fast integration automation capabilities. Stability and business continuity have become priorities for companies, this is where Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) have been very efficient.
Hybrid and Multi cloud solutions are contributing to the exponential growth of cloud. Managements recognize the risks of relying too heavily on one provider, and multi-cloud setups allow companies to take advantage of the unique strengths of different platforms. Harsha stated, “In simple words this approach allows flexibility and avoids single-vendor lock-in which is proving to be more efficient. There are more tools available to maintain consistency across providers which has enabled workload portability and a major growth driver. Both service providers and enterprises have moved in sync to make hybrid and multi-cloud approaches not only feasible but highly effective”.
Delving deeper into the subject Harsha said, “Established industries relying heavily on legacy systems, migrating to the cloud can be still challenging. These companies rely on legacy systems which are more often than not, monolithic and designed for on-premise environments. Migration of IaC clearly has more benefits but it doesn’t happen for everyone overnight. While they were once best practice, they’re now riskier and archaic to adapt.
Challenge at Hand
In certain industries where large volumes of sensitive datasets are involved, moving data securely without disrupting operations often requires temporary hybrid setups to sync data between on-prem and cloud systems, which is all the more complicated by compliance requirements. This is often seen in healthcare or power sectors. “Security is the prima facie challenge”, Penubadi points out. He further added, “Such companies require a different approach due to the expanded attack surface. We need to secure data at multiple levels with strict identity, access management and network security. These days with the increase in remote working, there are far more endpoints to manage. Security in these environments is all about consistency rather than reactivity”.
Modernizations Impacting Infrastructure Deployment
Edge computing is grain ground especially in latency-sensitive IoT applications like autonomous driving and industrial automation. Edge devices perform most of the processing instead of backhauling data to a central cloud and it sends only relevant data back to the cloud for storage or further analysis. Other technologies like serverless and microservices have also become very common, branching from IaC principles.
AI of Things
Harsha throws light on AI integration with the cloud infrastructure as the new addition and fast growing. He said, “It’s become another layer of automation across the stack, especially for anomaly detection and resource allocation. A very interesting application is self-healing infrastructure where systems “learn” to recognize issues like failing nodes or network latency and adjust configurations or restart services without manual intervention”.
Finally, for organizations wanting to keep pace with advancements in cloud infrastructure, what technical advice would you give?
Penubadi signs off with a quick blueprint for Cloud adoption, “Adopting Infrastructure as Code is the first step, without strict latency or security requirements—it offers consistency and scalability that can be difficult to achieve with traditional infrastructure. A close second is to focus on developing an integrated CI/CD pipeline that incorporates DevSecOps. The cost and time saved from automation can be redirected to secure and optimize architecture. At the same time, it is equally important to upskill your team, this is a very dynamic environment, technology is evolving every day.
