Communications and the cloud have seemingly become synonymous. The pandemic-induced trend toward working from home prompted companies to adopt “as a service,” or UCaaS, solutions for collaboration.
This created a massive wave of deployments, and some industry observers began to believe that the on-premises opportunity, which includes private cloud, will no longer be viable.
The past two years have brought a significant amount of societal change, including the way we work. This shift in lifestyle to one that is largely digital also brought about a surge in cyberattacks, which rose in both frequency and complexity last year, with several threats causing concern among industry experts into 2022.
Enterprise data cloud provider Cloudera today released a new study, “Limitless: The Positive Power of AI,” which explores how organizations use artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and data analytics to improve business outcomes in a post-pandemic world. The study also examines the rise of environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) and how organizations choose to use these technologies for the greater good.
Communications is moving to the cloud. That should be obvious to everyone at this time. What’s less obvious is that the definition of cloud is changing.
In reality, cloud has been constantly evolving since the early 2000s. The first wave of cloud was akin to a hosted service where cloud providers did a “lift and shift” of a big PBX and moved it into a hosting center. There were only two cloud-like things about these UCaaS and CCaaS providers: their infrastructure on the company premises and customers could shift to a subscription model.
Many predicted that the cloud would be the death knell for data centers. The use of public cloud services would make data centers obsolete – but that never came true.
In fact, the data center has never been more important. The enterprise is going through a data center Renaissance, where everything is moving to some kind of data center – whether it’s in a centralized public cloud, private cloud or edge location.