10 years of Cloud Computing

A decade later, the Bankinter Innovation Foundation held a Future Trends Forum on Cloud Computing, preparing a publication that gathered the knowledge of world experts in the field, such as I Irving Wladawsky-Berger,(IBM) or Peter Coffee (Salesforce).

Called the third wave of Information Technologies (after the models of centralized computing -mainframe- and client-server),  it is that anything that can be done in computing can be transferred to the cloud or what is the same, to the Network. This model involves the use of computing resources as one more supply, just as if it were electricity or the telephone. These resources are offered by cloud providers, who manage them in large remote data centers and serve multiple customers who access them through any device connected to the Internet.

The Cloud Computing market was then about 20 billion euros. Today, that figure has increased 10-fold.

According to a April 2020 Gartner report, the global market for public cloud services is estimated to grow by 17.5% in 2019 to a total of $214.3 billion, up from $182.4 billion in 2018. 

In addition to this impressive growth, we are witnessing two major paradigm shifts in computing: – Decentralization, with the emergence of Edge Computing, forced by the emergence of the Artificial  Intelligence and the  Internet of Things, – the “Cloud Native”, where services, functions and platforms become interchangeable thanks to the widespread use of open source and the standardization of protocols, modules and functions.

Many of the things that our experts predicted have been confirmed and today we find a much more mature market, led by the big technology companies, with Amazon and its AWS service at the forefront.

What things that our experts said have been fulfilled?

 – Within the curve of adoption of technological innovations, 10 years ago we were in the stage of Early Adopters, where only the most visionary and the most innovative had embarked on the path towards the use of Cloud Computing. We were at a point where the technology still did not have enough acceptance so that we could talk about a majority implementation. However, experts agreed that this situation was about to change because the technology had matured enough and a strong industry had been established, with players such as Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, IBM or Amazon. 

 – Our experts said that the benefits for companies seemed too attractive a priori to be ignored, especially in the case of small and medium-sized companies, for which Cloud Computing meant a democratization of the power of technology. And this has been demonstrated. According to GlobalDots, 77% of companies have at least one application or part of their enterprise computing infrastructure in the cloud.

– Public Administrations had the opportunity, according to our experts, to migrate services for citizens to the cloud, not only to save costs, but to provide a more convenient service to the citizen. Many administrations have gone to an Open Data model and today offer a multitude of procedures that can be done online. In the Spanish case, Cloud Computing, according to an analysis by AdjudicacionesTIC, continues to grow at an enormous pace: during 2018 83 projects worth approximately 32 million euros were awarded, while in 2017, 16.7 million euros were invested in 50 projects.

– Cloud Computing, beyond converting fixed costs into variable costs, was going to be a catalyst for social innovations and new business models and our experts pointed to the so-called collaborative economy. Uber or Airbnb have benefited from the enormous spread of smartphones and the business model of Cloud Computing. Many of these companies have built global empires by simply taking existing businesses, such as taxis, food delivery, and hotels, and making them mobile. Some of the startups that didn’t exist then, have already become giants: Uber, for example, has a valuation of 50 billion euros. Spain has not been oblivious to this type of models and perhaps the most paradigmatic example is Cabify, having also a strong implementation of other European models such as BlaBlaCar (France) or Deliveroo (United Kingdom).

– The experts of the Future Trends Forum agreed in 2010 that the future of Cloud Computing depended on the specialization of the service offer and that the user could customize it.  While a large majority of providers offered a wide range of integrated cloud services, there were still others that specialized more in certain areas, such as Salesforce or NetSuite. Nowadays there is a hybridization and co-request of actors never seen in the world of ICTs: 

– The experts of the Future Trends Forum also agreed that the barriers to be overcome were the lack of standards and use of open source, the possible lack of confidentiality of data and security against cyberattacks. On these three fronts, a lot of progress has been made with initiatives such as the Open Container Initiative and the CNCF – Cloud Native Computing Foundation in the field of standardization and open source or the Cloud Security Allianc e and international regulations such as the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and public initiatives such as the FedRAMP (Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program) in the US in the field of security.