Technology Trends – Cloud and Edge Computing
Every year, the McKinsey Technology Council prepares an exhaustively researched list of the technology trends capturing the imagination of enterprises worldwide. The McKinsey Technology Trends Outlook 2024 is now out and, as always, it makes for some interesting reading.
One trend that continues to occupy pride of place in the enterprise tech ecosystem is Cloud and Edge Computing. Given the maturity and sheer presence, it’s not surprising to see McKinsey denote this as “Fully scaled” in the adoption stakes. About half of all enterprises are either in the middle of efforts to scale their adoption or have already achieved scale.
McKinsey makes the interesting observation that achieving such levels of scale is not up to enterprises alone. It also suggests that the external ecosystem of tools, vendors, applications, and tracking and monitoring processes is also robust, proven, and available. McKinsey also makes the point that while at a slow pace, innovation is also underway in this space.
Based on our work with enterprises, I believe that much of that is in areas looking to make it easy to manage cloud workloads economically and securely. The cloud ecosystem is becoming extremely complex, and concerns like escalating costs and opaque security systems are causing real concerns today. We also find ourselves doing a lot of work in managing the move to the cloud. The transition from an on-premise system to the cloud or from one cloud provider to another has become quite challenging and CIOs are rightly worried about getting it right.
McKinsey only confirms what most of us believe anyway. That the cloud is now embedded into the enterprise tech fabric. Enterprises are looking for ways to use it to the best extent possible and while avoiding the pitfalls that inevitably accompany major technological shifts.