Home / Cloud Services /
Much like its meteorological namesake, the ‘business cloud’ is in constant flux. Real clouds, the ones up in the sky, change their state depending on the weather conditions on which their existence depends. In the business and technology world, the 'cloud' is constantly changing in relation to the business landscape.
The dominance of AI, increasing cyber security concerns, the broad adoption of software as a service, exponential data expansion, the proliferation of connected devices, and the normalisation of mobile and hybrid working, are all changing the nature of the cloud, and asking organisations to rethink what form their cloud should take.
To understand how our operational landscape will influence the business cloud, and to explore how organisations should be using it, we sat down with Tecala’s Managing Director, Pieter DeGunst, to get his insights.
We all know that the cloud is different for every organisation, depending on their operations and their workloads.
As we head towards 2025, we’re seeing cloud shift from an ‘infrastructure’ and ‘platform’ as a service focus, towards a software as a service (SaaS) provider. Some cloud platform players are already dominating the market, such as Service Now, Salesforce, Microsoft, Atlassian, and Adobe. But other players will emerge as the decade progresses.
IDC predicts that “750 million cloud-native applications will be created globally by 2025, as businesses work toward building these sustainable digital value engines."
In this model, organisations will use different applications from different vendors and use middleware to enable the different applications and services to communicate and seamlessly work together.
The maturity and ease-of-use of these SaaS applications and platforms means that they can be quickly purchased and configured to run core business processes within hours of the need arising. This freedom and flexibility in the cloud enables the kind of operational efficiency and agility organisations need.
Every industry has its own unique operating conditions. These commonalities are driving the adoption of Industry Cloud Platforms (ICPs) – tailored cloud solutions designed to meet the specific needs of particular industries. They turn a cloud platform into a business platform and innovation tool.
As we explained in the first section, the cloud enables agility. But being able to integrate industry-tailored SaaS with these platforms enables organisations to quickly adopt industry-ready cloud solutions, that are aligned with traits unique to that industry.
Gartner expects that by 2027, more than 70% of enterprises will use industry cloud platforms (ICPs) to accelerate their business initiatives, up from less than 15% in 2023.
The uptake in these platforms will be driven mostly by the commonalities within industry verticals, and the cost benefits derived from adopting a tried and tested industry standard approach.
But we should caution: organisations pursuing this too heavily risk diminishing, or removing all together, the competitive advantage of developing their own bespoke platforms. With an ICP, organisations are basically adopting the same approach as their competitors, so they may find themselves trading in competitive advantage for cost savings and ease of adoption.
We’re already seeing the new era of cloud computing being dominated by AI. Instead of just using cloud computing for basic IT needs, like storing data or running applications, businesses are now focusing on using cloud services combined with artificial intelligence to achieve bigger goals, like improving customer experiences or creating new products. In all these SaaS applications and platforms, AI is performing as the catalyst for transformation.
To support and drive these applications and platforms, we’re expecting to see a continued migration of data to the cloud, en-masse, to leverage the opportunities of innovation, insights, and cost savings.
Because data is the fuel of the digital era, we’re seeing more emphasis on developing and maintaining its quality and integrity. In any digital transformation scenario, data is the critical foundational element.
We’re therefore expecting to see more organisations take workloads and applications off the public cloud and relocate them locally, in their own private cloud.
Data in the cloud provides ubiquitous access to information from anywhere with an internet connection. It enhances collaboration among employees, partners, and customers, as they can easily share and collaborate on documents, projects, and data in real-time, regardless of their location.
But the changing nature of workloads and the increasing sophistication of cyber threats are leading organisations to the following conclusion: “Not everything always needs to be hosted in public cloud environments; and there are benefits to bringing data and workloads onto more private, hybrid, or on-prem environments1.”
Since 2023 we’ve seen more organisations ‘bring their data back home’, and we’re expecting to see that trend continue. This ‘repatriation of the cloud’ might seem counter-intuitive when you see the global adoption of cloud services generally, but we have to remember that repatriation is still a cloud strategy – partly driven by the rising costs of the public cloud, but more significantly by the nature of the workloads we’re putting through the cloud, many of which are AI-generated.
The reason the workloads being generated through AI are best kept in a private cloud is partly driven by privacy and security. Organisations need to ensure the security and privacy of their data and maintain control over the infrastructure. This approach also ensures compliance with regulatory requirements.
But there’s another important reason organisations will want to keep data private: the proliferation of AI-powered platforms, like ChatGPT, is shining a spotlight on where and how data and private information is being used.
OpenAI is transparent about the possibility that the private information one person uses may appear in someone else’s conversation2. Their charter clearly states that “your conversations may be reviewed by our AI trainers to improve our systems.”
So to protect themselves against data being used for the improvement of other people’s data pools to train their large language models (LLMs), more organisation will develop their own bespoke GAI platforms in the private cloud, using their own data, which can be protected by appropriate encryption of data at rest and data privacy governance.
Tecala’s own Tecala GPT is a good example of this. If you want to learn more, you can follow this link.
Generative AI will accelerate the adoption of cloud platforms, because the cloud provides organisations with a faster path to unlocking the power of generative AI. And we’re expecting the outcomes to be transformational: improving customer experiences, driving innovation in product development, and optimising backend processes.
But we’ll see organisations putting an impenetrable Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) security framework around these environments, to ensure the integrity of their data and the protection of the competitive advantage their automation and AI-powered applications and platforms are generating for them.
With AI workloads in particular, it's critical to ‘own’ the IP. If organisations allow their AI initiatives to be on OpenAI, Google, Amazon, or any of the other public AI platforms, they’ll find themselves feeding their language models, and eroding their competitive advantage.
Security is the key theme in the cloud of the future. And the approach we’re seeing organisations take to security in the cloud is a strategic response to a landscape marked by digital transformation, the adoption of AI, hybrid working, and the proliferation of mobile devices. Essentially, all the foundational elements of the modern workplace.
While we do strongly advocate for migration to cloud, it can’t be done in isolation. Security controls need to be in place in situ, as the organisation’s operating posture moves. The data universe, the data lake, and the dashboards teams are using to provide insight from data, all need to seamlessly shift and respond as the organisation moves things around.
The increasing need for secure, reliable access for remote workers, heightened concerns about cloud security, and the necessity to protect against sophisticated cyber threats, will continue to drive the adoption of Zero Trust access and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) frameworks into a single, cloud-delivered service model.
As we said in the introduction, we’re expecting to see the likes of Microsoft, Salesforce, Adobe, Atlassian, and others dominate the new software as a service nature of the business cloud.
We’ll continue to see organisations accessing these applications on their cloud, most likely with middleware providing that integration layer or ‘bridge’ between the applications and their own private data. This will enable seamless integration and data exchange between different SaaS applications and on-premises systems, and allow organisations to use multiple SaaS providers without being tied to a single vendor.
We’ll see a cloud repatriation approach being the main tool organisations use to leverage the very best of SaaS providers’ ecosystems, while bringing AI workloads and other private sensitive data back to owned infrastructure in the private cloud, encircled by SASE security frameworks.
This hybrid approach will ensure data security, compliance, and flexibility. And it will optimise performance and cost-efficiency, without sacrificing any of the benefits of public cloud services.
Pieter DeGunst is Managing Direct at Tecala. As a director and co-founder of Tecala, he has strategically driven and inspired the company’s rapid growth, while ensuring that we always place our people and customers at the heart of everything we do. He remains closely involved with clients, and collaboratively leads a team of world-class talent who ensure each engagement delivers brilliant outcomes for everyone.
¹ IT Pro; What is cloud repatriation?, May 2023.
² Forbes; Samsung Bans ChatGPT Among Employees After Sensitive Code Leak, May 2023.
Share this article
In the wake of the increasing regularity of high-profile attacks on Australian organisations, including Optus, Medibank, and Medicare, the Australian Federal Government spent much of 2023 engaged in a consultation process to identify necessary updates to the Privacy Act.
We’d have to think hard to remember a time when IT leaders weren’t being asked to ‘do more with less’. It’s part of the job description to find innovative ways to extract ‘optimal value’ from existing or shrinking budgets.
