Cloud technology will dominate half of ICT investments in 2020

The digital transformation of organizations is a fact that continues to increase both globally and nationally. However, within this panorama is the cloud technology that is capturing the maximum limelight of the investments to which time it facilitates interesting changes in different dimensions.

Organizational and funding transformations

The report “Predictions 2017” prepared by the consulting firm IDC concludes that the process of digital transformation of companies is a fact that will not be reversed, regardless of the economic sector or the size of organizations.

Over the next few years, technological and digital skills will assume a greater role within the managerial profiles of organizations and their boards of directors. But we will also see the emergence of new profiles that will be essential in any company, such as the Chief Digital Officer or the Chief Data Officer.

Together with these organizational changes, digital transformation is also propitiating the search for new financing formulas characterized by inter-company collaboration and minimization of risks. We speak, for example, of crowdsourcing or kickstarter.

Cloud technology as the core of digital transformation

But one of the most relevant aspects revealed by this IDC report confirms that Big Data and IoT will play the lion’s share of technology investments. In fact, it is estimated that in the case of Spain, in 2018, 48% of organizations will have invested in IoT, while 40% will have adopted Big Data technologies.

Ricardo Malhado, senior analyst at IDC Spain, points out that “we are facing the so-called data economy, a clear opportunity for technology providers who will play a crucial role in helping companies identify opportunities to monetize the data they generate and manage.”

IDC’s “Predictions 2017” report points out 10 keys to the digital transformation of companies over the next three years, of which three are particularly relevant to the future of cloud technology investments:

• By 2020, the top 5 cloud providers will control at least 75% of the PaaS (Platform as a Service) / IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) combined market share.

• By 2017, more than 60 percent of IT business organizations building hybrid clouds will buy new or updated unified cloud management solutions focused on workloads.

• By 2018, more than 85% of IT business organizations will have committed to multi-cloud architectures, driving the rate and pace of change in IT organizations.

In this way, the digital transformation of companies will be increasingly supported by cloud technology, especially in relation to IoT, Big Data and mobility, which will have a great impact on the way in which technology is consumed, in the architecture of the applications, in the volume and profitability of the businesses, and a long etcetera. “Cloud is an opportunity,” says Laura Castillo, an analyst at IDC Spain, “because it offers agility and scalability that other technologies do not offer and that will also mean that 50% of the planned spending on SaaS solutions“.