Cloud Computing Innovations You Can’t Ignore

The biggest opportunities for cloud computing are yet to come, as the technology joins with advances including serverless architecture, artificial intelligence and quantum computing to enable true innovation.

Cloud has been an undeniable success for many businesses, helping them to transform and reach new goals. The nature of its scale, flexibility and speed to deploy make the cloud powerful for solving traditionally difficult business problems. But the true potential of cloud is just beginning to be tapped. When used in conjunction with other advances changing the face of modern technology, the cloud will enable innovation to happen more easily and quickly than ever. Major benefits fall into two distinct areas.

Architectural freedom

The purest forms of cloud allow businesses to simply “rent” applications or resources as needed, providing them with new services on the spot. For those integrating with existing systems, serverless architecture is the latest advance, giving developers the ability to create and deploy applications unhampered by legacy infrastructure. Serverless goes beyond the concepts of containers and microservices to adopt a model in which the infrastructure is truly abstracted. It makes applications more efficient and easier to develop and maintain, because they are only executed when triggered by a specific event, and then deprovisioned. Deployment cycles are faster and costs are significantly lower, making serverless an attractive way to experiment with and roll out new applications.

Superior data intelligence

The goal of most applications is some type of data access and analysis, and capabilities in this area are growing at warp speed. Artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language processing allow businesses to understand, learn from and respond to the data they have on hand. Only combining these capabilities with the cloud, however, allows for economies of scale, unlimited storage and true visibility into the largest data sets in the world — collected across organizations, consumers and the Internet of Things. This makes possible commercial successes like Amazon Echo, as well as remarkable innovations such as mapping genes for cancer research. As data volumes grow, quantum computing cloud to provide will be massively employed parallel in the processing, atomic-level storage and increased security in order to move beyond mining existing data to building applications that think and act on their own.