Ease of use, mobility, accessibility from anywhere in the world, security, cost reduction, flexibility, scalability. Cloud computing services drive companies’ digital transformation.
Cloud services hosted by external suppliers over the internet make it so that companies needn’t make large investments on infrastructure, specialised technical staff or software licences. In addition, organisations get to have access to the latest technology, as the cloud service provider itself takes care of these updates.
It also allows them to pay only for what they actually use, depending on their needs at the time, given that cloud technology makes adopting solutions– from the simplest to the most complex–an easy task, and thus keeps up with fluctuations in the company’s business requirements.
It should be noted that cloud computing services can include both the infrastructure and the platforms and software that users access via the Internet. For this reason, company managers can focus their efforts and resources on business management and needn’t worry, for example, about aspects such as security or employee accessibility, since it is the supplier company that is responsible for the security and recovery of the information deposited in its network infrastructures, as well as for protecting access to the data.
The survival of companies depends on their digital transformation. The market growth that took place in recent years in connection with this technology has demonstrated the benefits it can bring to different production sectors and, more recently, it has been essential during the health crisis, as many companies maintained their activity thanks to the possibility of working remotely over the internet and with any device, and the option to access the services and information stored in cloud applications from anywhere over the internet.
A growing market
In 2019, the technology consultancy IDC Research Spain indicated that by 2023 the cloud market in Spain would practically triple in volume compared to the figure reached in 2018, reaching 2.8 billion euros.
More recently, in 2021, the digital consultancy firm Quint estimated in its latest report on the Cloud Market in Spain that the top 100 large Spanish companies will have invested more than 2.4 billion euros in the cloud by 2022.
This investment is backed by the increase in demand for services related to large volumes of data and to new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning.
Along the same lines, according to the Digital Economy and Society Index carried out by the European Commission, in 2019, Spain ranked tenth in the continent in terms of digitisation, ahead of countries such as Germany and Italy and below others such as Denmark and Sweden, according to five essential parameters: connectivity, human capital, use of Internet services, digital public services and integration of digital technologies.
Predictions and new technologies
As Telefónica’s “2021 Cloud Predictions” report indicates, the pandemic accelerated the need for companies to go digital, causing businesses to focus on this transformation. The acceleration of this change has been a global macroeconomic trend that has boosted an exponential growth in the adoption of cloud technologies.
In addition, the distribution of applications and data has changed, due to the expansion of technologies such as the loT, AI and automatic or machine learning. This implies that the cloud is the backbone of the 5G network, thus favouring the automation of processes in these environments.
