Nobody knows what the future holds. This is true in any regard, but when you’re in business, planning ahead is something that you might rely on in order to feel confident about your trajectory.
This is complicated further by the sheer number of innovations and transformations that can occur in the business technology landscape, leading to a situation where you don’t know if any direction you take is guaranteed longevity.
Looking at the landscape, however, can still help you to identify certain trends – trends that are being built upon more and more every day, making them routes that might make for surer investments than alternatives.
Get Organized
In basic terms, your business isn’t going to last for long if you aren’t organized or structured in a way that’s going to withstand the winds of time. Being efficient and effective, streamlined, clear of intention and plan – these are qualities that are going to help your business grow more smoothly and adapt to any changes that come your way.
In order to do this, it might mean that you have to restructure how you currently do things, but it could also be more about the way that you currently run your business. Professionals, such as those at Cedar Bay for instance, can help you to implement ERP into your business, giving you a more direct oversight into each aspect of your business and letting you make data-driven decisions that you can be more confident in.
The Cloud
Of all the technologies that might ultimately play a role in the future of business, the cloud is one that’s looking like it’s sticking around. It has been implemented in such a wide array of industries that it’s not hard to imagine how it could work for you.
This doesn’t have to be some nebulous concept that you imagine either; it might be that your business is already utilizing the cloud in terms of storage, security, or even just day-to-day work through certain working platforms.
Looking more deeply into the range of applications that cloud technology has might allow you to think more specifically about the future it plays in your business. Sometimes these solutions might be creative – pertaining to your specific brand or industry, but other times, it might just be about examining the pros and cons of a cloud security system over one that doesn’t use it.
What is cloud computing, in simple terms?
Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services—including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence—over the Internet (“the cloud”) to offer faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale.
How does cloud computing work?
Rather than owning their own computing infrastructure or data centres, companies can rent access to anything from applications to storage from a cloud service provider.
One benefit of using cloud-computing services is that firms can avoid the upfront cost and complexity of owning and maintaining their own IT infrastructure, and instead simply pay for what they use, when they use it.
In turn, providers of cloud-computing services can benefit from significant economies of scale by delivering the same services to a wide range of customers.
How important is the cloud?
Building the infrastructure to support cloud computing now accounts for a significant chunk of all IT spending, while spending on traditional, in-house IT slides as computing workloads continue to move to the cloud, whether that is public cloud services offered by vendors or private clouds built by enterprises themselves.
Indeed, it’s increasingly clear that when it comes to enterprise computing platforms, like it or not, the cloud has won.
Tech analyst Gartner predicts that as much as half of spending across application software, infrastructure software, business process services and system infrastructure markets will have shifted to the cloud by 2025, up from 41% in 2022. It estimates that almost two-thirds of spending on application software will be via cloud computing, up from 57.7% in 2022.
What cloud-computing services are available?
Cloud-computing services cover a vast range of options now, from the basics of storage, networking and processing power, through to natural language processing and artificial intelligence as well as standard office applications. Pretty much any service that doesn’t require you to be physically close to the computer hardware that you are using can now be delivered via the cloud – even quantum computing.
What are examples of cloud computing?
Cloud computing underpins a vast number of services. That includes consumer services like Gmail or the cloud backup of the photos on your smartphone, though to the services that allow large enterprises to host all their data and run all of their applications in the cloud. For example, Netflix relies on cloud-computing services to run its its video-streaming service and its other business systems, too.
Cloud computing is becoming the default option for many apps: software vendors are increasingly offering their applications as services over the internet rather than standalone products as they try to switch to a subscription model. However, there are potential downsides to cloud computing, in that it can also introduce new costs and new risks for companies using it.
New Faces
Of course, there are also going to be emergent technologies that threaten to shake up the game entirely. Artificial intelligence (AI) is perhaps the most prominent recent example of this, and when such an emergence occurs, it’s easy to re-examine your entire operation and think about pivoting towards a model that incorporates this.
It’s a worthy debate to have, and waiting too long always puts you at risk of being overtaken by other brands that jumped on the bandwagon early – though make the wrong call and an investment such as this could backfire and have you needing to change direction yet again in the near future.