IT Cloud Computing: Analyzing Annual Cloud Services Consumer Trends

This report analyzes the annual consumer trends in cloud services, highlighting the growth in cloud adoption, the shift towards public and hybrid cloud strategies, and the increasing market size of cloud computing. It examines the investment patterns in SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS, along with the main cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. The report also discusses the advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing, addressing concerns about IT staff readiness, bandwidth, and security. Furthermore, it delves into cloud security issues like DDoS attacks and employee negligence, emphasizing the importance of centralized security and cost reduction. The report concludes by referencing various sources, providing a comprehensive overview of the cloud computing landscape and its evolving trends. Desklib provides access to this report and many other solved assignments for students.

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Annual Cloud Services Consumer Trends
Studying and analyzing trends is essential especially for the business sector. It provides an
insight about that business in the past and current situation, both domestically and globally. In
addition, they enable decision makers to make better predictions about the future (Wang,
2017, p. 542).
Growth of using clouds:
According to the Right Scale 2017, cloud computing survey, 95% of businesses that were
under study attested to using at least one cloud, 85% confirmed that they are using several
clouds .Another survey which was conducted in 2018 shows by the end of 2018, almost 90%
of companies will be moving their workloads to the cloud computing.
Sources: (Sosinsky, 2015, p. 411)
Which type of clouds has grown most?

Right Scale 2017 indicated that average organizations currently runs the majority of their
workloads through the cloud whereby 32% of them use the public cloud while 43% are using
the private could. However, The Statista's 2019 survey indicates that the public cloud became
a top priority for many organizations in 2018 up from 28% in 2017 to 38% in 2018 (Buyya,
2015, p. 295). Another survey which was conducted by Right scale in 2019 shows that the
majority of companies (up to 84%) consider the hyper-cloud is the preferred strategy for
them. This is represented by the increase in utilizing hyper-cloud from 51% in 2018 to 58%
in 2019. On the other hand, companies with multiple public clouds or multiple private clouds
plan at the same period have witnessed slight decline.
Source: (Wang, 2017, p. 672)
Cloud Computing Market Size:

The Statista's 2019 survey also indicated that cloud-computing market has continued to
witness faster growth in the past decade from $58 billion in 2013 and it was expected to hit a
$130 billion in 2018 while it is projected to hit $160 billion by 2020.
Total Investment on Cloud:
In 2018, a survey was conducted to investigate the total investments on cloud computing
That the companies are planning to spend is about US $3.5M on average base. The largest
Proportion of IT budget which was 30% was allocated to SaaS (48% of the total 30%), IaaS
(30%) and PaaS (21%) (Bahga, 2018, p. 118). As a result, the average investment on cloud
computing has witnessed
a significant increase from U$ 1.62M in 2016 to U$ 2.2M in 2018.
Source: (Wang, 2017, p. 41)
Main Cloud Providers for the Business Sector

 Amazon Web Service (AWS): It is considered to the top most among all other
providers who provide Infrastructure–as–a-Service “IaaS” platform. AWS works on
different fields such as Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence and analytics. Many
high profile companies utilize AWS platform such as NASA, Expedia and Slack.
 Microsoft Azure: It is the main rival to AWS which offers a wide variety of options to
the customers through IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. Adobe, Johnson Control and HP are
examples of the companies that use Azure’s cloud services (Miller, 2014, p. 432).
 Google Cloud: It is a public cloud that offers a robust set of services for the customers
such as Networking, machine learning and security tools. Main Google cloud
customers include HSBC, Bloomberg and PayPal.
Advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing
While it is noticeable that many of well-known organizations across the globe are busy
moving to the cloud, some organizations are still hesitating to take the same move. It is clear
for such companies that they have many doubts and fears about what could be the possible
consequences if they take that step. Some fears that the decision makers might have include:
1. Does our IT staff have the required efficiency to deal with cloud infrastructure?
2. Moving all data and applications on the cloud could affect the bandwidth and
performance (John W. Rittinghouse, 2016, p. 572).
While it is an obvious that these fears arose from the lack of experience about the clouds,
they can be addressed easily such that:
 Fear #1 treatment: Before selecting any cloud, the right thing is to ask whether they
offer a team of experts to make the process of moving data and application smooth or
not
 Fear #2 treatment: The proper solution is to hire a professional company to assess the
performance of the existing network. In addition, what is the suitable capacity of data
that can flow through your network.

While the field of cloud computing are witnessing qualitative leaps and noticeable
progress at various levels, it has some drawbacks. In the following section, both
advantages and disadvantages will be discussed thoroughly (Ransome, 2013, p. 21).
Advantages:
o Easy to implement; The utilization of cloud enables the users to maintain the same,
together with those business processes without having any backend technicalities.
The cloud is usually readily manageable through the internet and the infrastructure
for the cloud allows the business organizations to access it much faster.
o Accessibility: The cloud used in organizations allows them to access their data from
any point and at any time. Due to that business organizations can greatly benefit from
the exploited efficiency and productivity via the open applications.
o No additional hardware required: transferring to utilization of the cloud would
directly translate that the existing organization’s in-house data center is of no use but
can be retained only as a backup in case of any issue. That is the cloud providers
provides data accessibility and storage on behalf of the user; thus, the user will not be
required to purchase any hardware again (Sosinsky, 2015, p. 55).
o Reduced Cost per head: since the cloud service provider handles all the work, the end
user will not need extra cost for operating an additional IT. Hence the organization
will be able to gain a lot from the reduced overhead expenses for technology, which
in turn enables the organizations to channel additional cash towards other core
business strategies and objectives in order to maximize profits.
o Scaled, the organizations using cloud can be able to subtract or add resources
depending on their needs. This will allow business organizations to grow as their
systems performs.

o Efficient recovery: This is normally achieved because the cloud computing services
delivers faster and more accurate retrieval of data and applications. Thus, with least
downtime, cloud computing can provide the most effective recovery plan (Buyya,
2015, p. 192).
Drawbacks of Cloud Computing
 Issues with the bandwidth: Majority of the clients who uses cloud computing
services are required effectively plan and to ensure that they does not pack a huge
amount of servers , which includes their storage devices into smaller sets of data
centers for effective performance of the cloud.
 Lack of redundancy: servers used in the cloud are never redundant nor are they
backed up thus any technology failure for one reason or another has made several
businesses to be worry of adopting such redundancy plans (John W. Rittinghouse,
2016, p. 619).
 In-house data centers still exist: Migrating to the cloud is not a guarantee of an
abolishment of the internal data centers and servers. In this given scenario, the
organization has to ensure that it has maintained its data centers to evade
instances of redundancy by backing up their data for quick recovery plans in case of
any failure on the provider’s servers.
 Security: this is the most significant components which the clients who intends to
migrate to the cloud computing have to consider. This is because the internet is the
only medium through which they will connect to the cloud. The entire cloud system
may be prone to regular attacks, with that it is the responsibility of the provider to
provide the required security features to the clients.
 Loss of data control: The moment a business organization decides to migrate to the
cloud, the business is hence handing over all its information and all the data to the
providers of cloud computing. This means those business organizations which have
in-house IT professionals will no longer handle issues on their own and neither will

they have to say or control over how such data is managed in the cloud (Ransome,
2013, p. 73).
Cloud Computing Security:
Cloud security can be defined as a combined set of procedures, roles, polices and controls
that work in parallel together to achieve the highest level of data protection, while the
responsibility to provide the cloud security services depends on the cloud provider, the
provider and the owner of the business should share the responsibility to implement the
security processes.
Importance of Cloud Security:
The world of technology is witnessing a rapid growth on all various aspects. Attackers are
continuously trying to develop their means and tools to be able to gain unauthorized access to
their targets. Cloud computing is one of the preferred targets for the attackers [16]. For this
Reason, it is necessary to have the best available security tools that the cloud providers
provide (Buyya, 2015, p. 65).
Major Cloud Computing Security issues:
 Distributed-Denial-of-Service Attacks (DDoS): They are attacks that disable the
user from accessing to the cloud entirely or the user may encounter difficulties to
access.
 Employee Negligence: Many employees use their own personal devices to access the
cloud. These devices can be exploited by attackers if they have vulnerability in their
protection system. As a result, the entire cloud will be vulnerable to attack.
 System Vulnerabilities: No matter how sophisticated the systems used to protect the
clouds, they still have some critical loopholes especially against new attacks. Once
these loopholes are recognized, the attackers can easily gain access to the cloud
resources (Buyya, 2015, p. 73).
Benefits of Cloud Computing Security:

 Centralized Security: This technique insures that different devices within the cloud will
be managed and protected centrally. As a result, the quality of traffic analysis and
monitoring the network will be improved. Moreover, the policies and updates will be
reduced accordingly.
 Cost Reduction: Once the user invests in the cloud security, there will be no longer need
to buy security tools to protect the devices. In addition, it offers a constant 24/7
protection with almost no need to the human resources interference (Miller, 2014, p.
182).
 Reliability: Cloud computing offers many great options for customers. With the
availability of cloud protection measures, this user can access the cloud with high
reliability regardless of when, where and which device being used.

References
Bahga, A., 2018. Cloud Computing: A Hands-On Approach. 4th ed. Chicago: CreateSpace
Independent Publishing Platform.
Buyya, R., 2015. Cloud Computing: Principles and Paradigms. 1st ed. Sydney: John Wiley
& Sons.
John W. Rittinghouse, 2016. Cloud Computing: Implementation, Management, and Security.
2nd ed. 5th: CRC Press.
Miller, M., 2014. Cloud Computing: Web-Based Applications That Change the Way You
Work and Collaborate Online. 4th ed. Chicago: Que Publishing,.
Ransome, J. F., 2013. Mastering Cloud Computing. 5th ed. Texas: Tata McGraw-Hill
Education,.
Sosinsky, B., 2015. Cloud Computing services. 4th ed. London: John Wiley & Sons.
Wang, L., 2017. Cloud Computing: Methodology, Systems, and Applications. 3rd ed.
Chicago: CRC Press.