Cloud computing has enabled many organizations of different sizes to scale computing resources to meet the growing workloads, remove the need for building, and maintaining data centers, reducing the capital expenditure planning process and eliminate the required costs for powering various severs and utilizing the growing capacity that can opted due to variable workloads. The potential benefits of cloud computing have not been realized completely across different sectors and industry. Several of the unique data protection or retention regulations, for example, some of the contextual factors that depend on several requirements such as having poor connectivity issues at the place of work that completely repels the practically general-purpose public cloud deployments. As the cloud solutions continue to mature for the businesses, major public cloud providers are investing in the solutions to meet the specialized needs; we are also seeing a race of specialized cloud service providers are entering the cloud solution war to deliver the highly polished, targeted features and support.  The cloud providers have pushed the impetus towards the solutions to migrate the legacy/on-premises systems on to the cloud that provides industry-specific applications that together has enabled the initiatives that are called an industry cloud. Industry cloud represents the efforts from traditional public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform (GCP) all provide new and customized solutions to meet all the business needs of organizations with required business operation across businesses that demand data protection or retention regulations to be followed.  Several vendors deliver solutions to satisfy operations with mission-critical applications and industry that experience regulatory restrictions for software that disallow the rapid changes endemic to software development.

Specialized industry-focused cloud services providers include Athenahealth, SAP, Veeva Systems, Medidata, Shopify and NCR that focus beyond Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings that include Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) services and extend for the Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).   Industry cloud solutions are just not limited to be an exclusively public cloud deployment as the regulations or preferences for data warehousing may be limiting the amount of data stored in public clouds that work-site factors limiting the connectivity where data is generated or used. Hybrid and private industry cloud solution deployments can be executed with more assistance that is based on the system integration firms that provide the required expertise in cloud on-boarding and bring the digital transformation.

Who benefits from industry cloud computing?

Businesses that have cloud solutions haven’t fully begun using them for complete operational requirements; multiple industries face multiple challenges that are specific to their business operation that add layers of complexity to the adoption of cloud computing.  Healthcare cloud services are increasingly perceived as an attractive option for the hospitals and primary healthcare providers, as the patient-facing operations face the complete set to regulations such as HIPAA that completely complicates the storage of, access to patient charts and records.  Other non-patient facing practices enjoyed several years of a head start in terms of cloud adoption as the data protection regulations are less of the factor for the complete business.  The potential for data-driven healthcare system will assist in serving patients more efficiently. Unique services that are pursuing the adoption of cloud services have to regard with other compliance requirements -PCI (Payment Card Industry)and SOX (Sarbanes Oxley Act) that protects shareholders and the general public from accounting errors and fraudulent practices in enterprises and to improve the accuracy of corporate disclosures. Even the other businesses can greatly benefit from the data generated from the Internet of Things (IoT) devices to determine the potential risks that many of the drivers pose on the road. Even various industry that doesn’t operate from any of the traditional offices, with the mobile-first approach for the businesses that migrate from worksite to worksite has to face a greater risk that depends on connectivity and use of cloud solutions. Even many of the agricultural use of the cloud solutions that are using industrial IoT devices hampered by the connectivity is still began looking for solutions.

Cloud vendors are in fierce competition, trying to develop a customized cloud solution and greater market capture, Gartner has weighed up the situation and trying to get a complete overall view about the market share from the providers. Amazon has been getting the benefit for being an early mover in space, according to the latest global Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) market the growth rate is around 31.3 percent in 2018. The Worldwide IaaS market was all set to reach $32.4 billion last year that has increased from $24.7 billion in 2017.  Amazon Web Services (AWS) has captured almost half of the market share that is 47.8 percent that is significantly greater than the second cloud vendor, Microsoft that has market share of 15.5 percent, while Alibaba takes the third spot with 7.7 percent, Google at 4 percent and IBM with 1.8 percent in the overall market share. Gartner’s 2018 IaaS Magic Quadrant has put Google as the leader alongside with AWS and Microsoft for the first time.  However it’s not surprising that out all the players Amazon shows the slowest growth across the four competitors between 2017 and 2018, with Alibaba leading at 92.6 percent growth, Microsft at 60.9 percent, Google at 60.2 percent and Amazon that is at lowest with 26.8 percent.

Conclusion

Cloud solutions have added much greater pace to digital transformation bringing a greater number of business solutions for the complete operational requirements. Cloud solutions have matured based on the industry requirements; the next step would be analytics to get new insights from all the types of data. The adoption of the cloud from all vendors has remained strong; it’s just that the pace in case of larger vendors could not continue at the same pace when the cloud revolution had begun.

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