Hosting Services – The ever-evolving landscape

We are currently in the middle of what’s been termed as the 4^th Revolution – a revolution that continues to see mini revolutions that are changing the business landscape at a breathtaking pace.

It won’t be amiss if we were to up the 4th revolution to a “Super Evolution” category and recognize the fact that we are all in the middle of it all as it unfolds in front of our eyes!

The IT Hosting landscape has evolved from the nascent data center days to a point today that was definitely not envisioned by the original creators of the data center industry. Traditional hosting meant collocation that very quickly evolved into managed hosting (and its various iterations). But the real game changer came in with the advent of cloud hosting around the latter half of the first decade of this new millennium. “Business at the speed of thought” term coined and conceptualized by Bill Gates truly came into being heralded by this new age of cloud computing.

Unheard and un-thought of features in the IT world have now become part of standard expectations of all and sundry. Features such as utility based billing model, elasticity that allows for no delay in spinning up (and down when needed) large and complex environments are features that have totally reengineered deployment processes that were held sacrosanct and continue to be so for many entities.

These shackles are being broken by more and more who are moving their workloads over to the cloud.

The Cloud Computing space is also spawning newer service offerings to help with business intelligence, security and resilience. Businesses are now more vulnerable to disruptions, from hurricanes to hackers than ever before, the stakes are higher, the demands even more. But those organizations that are building in business resilience into their operations and are converting their data output into consumable and actionable points, are the ones that we see are already leading the pack in their respective domains.

Cloud computing is also getting a shot in the arm with the rise of Containerization and Docker technologies. Containers and container platforms provide a lot more advantages over traditional virtualization since isolation is done on the kernel level without the need for a guest operating system, so containers are much more efficient, fast, and lightweight. In order for containers within the application to communicate between each other, emerged technologies like Kubernetes. All these will only go further to enhance the consumer experience whilst keeping costs low.

Where we are headed next, we have an inkling of already. Technologies that are powering AI, ML and Deep Learning are upon us and will have a significant impact on how we consume information and deploy applications.

In the next segment we will talk about these disruptive trends from within the cloud space that will continue to revamp the landscape.