The most important cloud trends 2019

Trend 1: Multi-cloud environments are catching on. In 2019, many enterprises will adopt a cloud-first strategy to benefit from greater flexibility, agility and cost savings.

According to a recent study by Forrester Consulting, 86 percent of companies already have a multi-cloud strategy. But whether they source services from different providers or "only" combine private and public cloud in a hybrid cloud with a hybrid multi-cloud approach - customers can pick and choose the best solution for each use case.

But those who use multiple clouds simultaneously also face new challenges in terms of data management.

Trend 2: Artificial intelligence in the cloud is picking up steam. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are currently the most "hyped" technologies and will continue to gain momentum in 2019.

Popular areas of application are chatbots in customer service and analytics, for example to control the maintenance of machines. Such analyses require huge amounts of data, which often have to be evaluated in real time.

This is best accomplished in a cloud environment. A particular challenge, however, is that many projects require data from different sources, which are also available in different formats.

Often, structured and unstructured data, as well as data streams from third-party providers, must flow together into analyses. This places high demands on data management and also raises questions regarding security, data resilience and data protection.

Trend 3: Data management as a service is becoming increasingly important. Both a hybrid multi-cloud environment and AI applications in the cloud require data management that enables companies to make data available at the right time and at the right speed, regardless of its origin, format and storage location.

This must also work when data is distributed across multiple clouds and local systems or delivered as a data stream from IoT devices. To meet the new challenges, data management will be increasingly in demand in the future.

Data management will become more important for companies in 2019. It's the only way they can take advantage of a hybrid multi-cloud environment without being slowed down by growing complexity.

Developers in particular can then concentrate fully on their projects and do not have to deal with the storage requirements of the various providers.

Such data management will also foster advanced AI applications that require large, distributed data sets and use cloud infrastructure.