Top trends in Cloud/Managed Hosting Services The top trend: increase in your cloud usage, you may want to pause and get the right Hybrid/Multicloud tools and processes in place to have visibility into your spend and usage. Digital Transformation comes in third, but our advisory partners Management still highly recommend creating or re昀椀ning your plan for this journey as a 2024 initiative. The bene昀椀ts of Digital Transformation are many, and the cost of inaction may soon outweigh the cost, risk, or pain of As applications grow within the IT portfolio, it starts to make sense change. If you’re already on your journey, 2024 brings an opportunity to adopt a Hybrid or Multicloud architecture so you can optimize to advance your transformation. The sunk cost of your analog invest- workloads across diverse environments. This could be deployed to ment is increasing with every day that passes. The faster you make give better insight into performance metrics, manage compliance, progress, the faster the ROI of your transformation materializes. enforce and manage internal data security policies, and/or maximize budget through cost optimization and monitoring. When it comes to cloud, the theme from our advisory partners is clearly optimization. Cloud Workload Optimization is another way to ensure the best and most cost-effective performance of your cloud The shift to cloud-based systems will technology. Done correctly, it ensures optimal resource utilization continue, and professionals with expertise and cost containment while also ensuring workloads are given the in cloud computing, including cloud resources they need. Edge Computing is another way to optimize, as it moves the compute resources needed off the cloud and brings architecture, deployment, and them closer to where the workload is needed. management, will be sought after. Automation and Orchestration are also about optimization. In this case, you’re managing complex processes and repetitive tasks, reducing the But managing multiple environments, from on-premises data centers need for human intervention and streamlining management. to public or private cloud environments (potentially with multiple Containerization allows IT to simplify the deployment of applications cloud providers involved), greatly increases the complexity of across devices, regardless of operating system or environment. By managing all of the moving parts. Having clarity of usage and costs is bundling the application code with the additional 昀椀les and libraries need- critical to proactively managing your environments. There are tools ed to run the application into a “container,” network administrators can on the market that can provide this clarity and give you the flexibility quickly deploy applications and reduce the overhead of management of to rearchitect or scale quickly. that process. If you manage many applications, for many users, across many devices and OSs, look into Containerization. Additional insights Serverless Computing gives devs the ability to do what they do As your cloud footprint grows and increases in complexity, which it best, write code, while a cloud service provider handles the process will inevitably do, Cloud Cost Management will become more crucial. of provisioning and deploying the server instances, optimizing their Leveraging di昀昀erent cloud cost models can help optimize your time and resources. expenditure. If 2024 is going to see your migration to the cloud or an UPSTACK © The 2024 Technology Trends Report | 8