2020 is a remarkable year. When you search online for this year, you'll find that many people started predicting events and changes that would happen in 2020 quite early. What challenges will the cloud computing field face in the coming year? A Techiexpert article (https://www.insightssuccess.com/how-will-cloud-computing-be-by-2020/) specifically discusses this topic and lists ten major aspects.

Challenge 1: Security

Security has been a primary concern since the advent of computers. Since public cloud emerged, enterprises have become even more worried about security risks, and this remains unchanged. According to reports, 77% of people consider cloud security to be a challenge.

Furthermore, security concerns seem to be diminishing over time, especially among companies that have been using cloud computing longer. RightScale's report shows that as enterprises become more experienced with cloud computing, the challenges also change. Security is one of the main issues for cloud beginners, while cost is a broad challenge for both advanced and novice users.

In a cloud analytics survey conducted by Teradata, approximately 50% of respondents noted that improving security has potential benefits beyond 2020 cloud adoption challenges. Vendors also offer countless solutions to handle cloud security threats. Additionally, a survey by Crowd Research Partners shows that these enterprises rely on IT staff certification and training provided by public cloud vendors as well as security tools to reduce risks.

For challenges and responses related to security, please refer to my previous article "Three Major Security Management Challenges and Response Strategies After Enterprises Move to the Cloud."

Challenge 2: Managing Cloud Costs

As already disclosed, RightScale's report shows that for some organizations managing cloud spending, it has even surpassed security to become the biggest challenge in cloud computing. According to their own estimates, companies now waste 42% of the money they spend on the cloud.

If users make a series of mistakes on the cloud, it may increase their costs. Especially for first-time cloud users, such mistakes occur frequently, and the complex billing methods of cloud vendors also increase the complexity of cost management.

Here's an advertisement: The billing management system of Ultrapower Cloud Business Division helps users manage bills very well, especially for complex business systems. It can manage bills according to systems, effectively helping users manage cloud costs and usage, reducing management difficulty and expenses.

Challenge 3: Lack of Expertise and Resources

RightScale's report shows that lack of expertise and resources is the biggest challenge for cloud migration in 2020, second only to security and cost management. Nearly 75% of respondents consider this a challenge, with 23% considering it a major challenge.

The "Robert Half Technology 2019 Salary Guide" shows that skilled workers who master technology and knowledge also master the latest developments in open source and cloud computing. In the coming years, big data, mobile, security, and other latest technologies will only become more valuable to enterprises.

Many companies even hope to overcome the challenges of migrating to cloud computing by hiring more experts with cloud computing skills or certificates. Experts also recommend training existing employees to keep up with work progress with the help of the latest technology.

As a witness, I have a deep understanding of this difficulty. In 2019, my company invested millions in cloud computing employee training alone, and the training provided to customers is also very rich.

Challenge 4: Governance Power

Governance and control rank fourth in the entire list of predicted cloud computing challenges for 2020. The survey shows that 70% of respondents call this a problem, with about 30% considering it a major challenge.

In this regard, one of the most important benefits of cloud computing in 2020—the speed and convenience of deploying new computing resources—may bring huge potential harm. Many organizations lack visibility into the "shadow IT" used by their employees, as well as governance based on challenges in hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments.

Some experts revealed that these organizations call for the following best practices to alleviate these cloud computing management problems, including enforcement, establishment, and related policies. Many companies offer cloud management software to simplify and automate processes.

Challenge 5: Compliance Requirements

According to many organizations' IT teams' compliance with regulations, recent activities around cloud computing and General Data Protection Regulation risks have resumed. In RightScale's survey, about 80% of respondents consider compliance to be the biggest challenge in cloud computing for 2020, with about 21% considering it a major challenge.

This is undeniable whether domestically or internationally. Whether it's the new Classified Protection 2.0 in China or GDPR abroad, there are very clear requirements in this regard.

Challenge 6: Managing Multi-Cloud Environments

Most organizations today don't just work on one cloud. According to the report, about 89% of organizations are pursuing a multi-cloud strategy, and 52% have a hybrid cloud strategy that combines private and public clouds. Additionally, companies are using 5 different private and public clouds.

To overcome this challenge, experts recommend adopting best practices such as training employees, rethinking processes, conducting research, actively managing vendor relationships and tools.

Challenge 7: Migration

When launching new applications in the cloud, the process is much simpler—migrating existing applications to new development environments in cloud computing environments. A multidimensional study by Velostrata found that approximately 62% of respondents considered their cloud migration projects to be much more complex than expected. Additionally, about 70% of migration projects took much longer than expected, and 60% exceeded budget.

More specifically, many organizations reported time-consuming troubleshooting, slow data migration, difficulty configuring security, difficulty synchronizing data before switching, difficulty getting migration tools to work correctly, and even downtime during migration when migrating applications to the cloud.

To overcome these challenges, surveyed IT team members revealed that they hope to conduct more pre-migration testing, hire internal experts, increase budgets, and develop longer project timelines.

In my experience, this requires close cooperation between cloud computing experts, database experts, and R&D teams. It's not as easy as people take for granted, although cloud deployment seems much simpler than before.

Challenge 8: Avoiding Vendor Lock-in

Currently, some of the top cloud service providers in 2020—Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, and AWS—dominate the public cloud market. In a survey on hybrid cloud, approximately 90% of respondents expressed moderate to high concern about this issue.

According to Gartner's cloud adoption statistics for 2020, the increasing dominance of hyperscale IaaS vendors presents challenges and opportunities for end users and other market participants. In response to the multi-cloud adoption trend, some organizations will increasingly demand a more direct way to move workloads, applications, and data across cloud provider IaaS offerings without paying any price.

Some experts suggest that before organizations adopt a specific cloud service, they should consider how easy it is to transfer those workloads to another cloud service.

Therefore, many customers are now abandoning some cloud platform-specific services and turning to services that are easier to deploy across clouds.

Challenge 9: Technology Immaturity

Many cloud computing services are based on cutting-edge technologies such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality, and advanced big data analytics. The potential downside of accessing such exciting new technologies is that services don't always meet enterprise expectations in terms of availability, performance, and reliability.

In a survey by Teradata, 85% of large enterprises showed that cloud computing is the best workplace for analytics, but about 90% of enterprises admitted that analytics work is not moving to cloud computing at the speed it should. 50% of respondents believe that part of the reason is technology immaturity or low performance.

Unfortunately, the only possible way to solve these problems is to adjust expectations and ensure trying to build your own solutions, or wait for vendors to improve their cloud computing in 2020 products.

Challenge 10: Integration

Finally, many organizations using hybrid cloud environments reported challenges related to making their public clouds work with on-premises applications. In Teradata's survey, about 40% of respondents said connecting legacy systems with cloud applications is a difficult obstacle to overcome.

Additionally, a software report on cloud spending showed that about 40% of respondents said connecting legacy systems is one of the biggest problems with using the cloud.

Integrating legacy systems and new cloud-based applications requires time, resources, and skills. However, many organizations find that the benefits of cloud computing outweigh the potential drawbacks of cloud computing technology.