Data management has always been pivotal to any successful application development and deployment, and with the cloud, this trend continues to grow, as now you can harness new channels of information as well as store petabytes of data easily. In fact, many organizations are now moving to a model where they are creating centralized data lakes, where data is being fed from various different sources, which includes devices connected to the web to social media and business applications, which is then used for analytics purposes and to get deep insights and trends.

The preceding trend has also been promoted by the fact that there are now better and faster options in order to move the data to the cloud. Until a few years back, it was only possible to transfer the data over the internet/network with options like AWS DirectConnect or by using virtual appliances like AWS Storage Gateway. However, in the last couple of years, all of the cloud providers have created physical appliances, like Amazon Snowball, which can be ordered to your data centers, connected locally to transfer data, and, once done, shipped back to cloud providers for moving data to services like Amazon S3. It's not just these smaller data transfer appliances, as now you can also request a 45-foot long ruggedized shipping container, pulled by a semi-trailer truck, that can transfer 100 PB data per AWS Snowmobile! This is just the beginning of innovation and in the future, transfer to/from the cloud will become even easier and that will further promote collection, aggregation, and analytics from vast sets of data. As data moves to the cloud, applications will follow the trend and that's the reason data will continue to be central in overall cloud adoption.

Future trend #7

Data will be central to any cloud deployment and, as data migration paths to the cloud become easier to use, cloud native architecture adoption will increase dramatically.