South Africa’s cloud adoption rate is on the increase and we are rapidly moving from cloud-first to a cloud-only methodology. The trend, which is rampant globally, is picking up speed as IDC predicts that 60 percent of enterprise IT workloads will be off premise.  Andrew Cruise, managing director, Routed, South Africa’s only neutral cloud infrastructure provider says that Cloud 2.0 is what 2018 will see evolve.

“The shakeout from Cloud 1.0 is where realism won through while many ideals and hype such as pure Public, pure Private and true Hybrid Cloud failed.  As we start moving into a Cloud 2.0 methodology, we will bear witness to what industry is calling the ‘Pragmatic Cloud’. This will address the messy Hybrid-and-multi-Cloud that we often see as enterprises struggle and fail to achieve perfect approach,” says Cruise.

The move from a cloud-first to a cloud-only strategy has established a new industry standard, according to Cruise: “There are several clouds, both public and private and the challenge is going to be for vendors to make this cloud-shift easier than the migration to Cloud 1.0. A common operating ecosystem that enterprises can easily run is vital. This ecosystem needs to assist enterprises to run, manage, connect, and secure their applications across the various clouds within the same common environment.”

But, Cloud 2.0 is not necessarily for newbies. Cruise says that as industry develops and demands, so cloud will need to adjust and deliver. IDC says that as cloud becomes more distributed, trusted, intelligent, and industry specialised, it will greatly expand.

Locally, the continent is already experiencing seismic shifts as a result of cloud and its impact on local IT strategies. While great strides have been made, exciting ones are afoot with cloud giants such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google establishing local Points of Presence: “This will change how IT works with constant innovation and new services launched almost weekly. It is here where it becomes clear that cloud is not just about a strategy, but is more and more about innovation,” explains Cruise.

He says that embracing Cloud 2.0 is about more than just assisting enterprises to reduce complexity, improve service delivery and reduce costs: “Google’s belief is that where 1.0 enabled organisations to focus less on infrastructure, Cloud 2.0 will eliminate the need to focus on virtualisation, automation, and software.  This will place a focus squarely on data and applications.”

So, as with other technologies that are better aimed at user demands, Cloud 2.0 is poised to be cloud as we know it, but with improved capabilities that assist organisations to make better and more informed bottom line decisions.