The cloud is close to a full takeover as the majority of businesses already rely on it for continuity purposes, for disaster recovery, as well as regularly updated and cost-effective hosted solutions in place of on-site equipment that immediately depreciates.
As a SaaS provider and MSP, we are seeing many businesses who haven’t already, taken the leap to cloud services. In our fast-paced world, it makes sense that employees are spreading out and working remotely. Thanks to the latest innovations with central management systems, providers can offer more permission controls to remote workers while maintaining reliable stability that can even replace MPLS for a cost-effective scalable solution for growing businesses.
We are seeing Unified Communications paired with SD-WAN used to increase communication between branch offices to an enterprise network or data center with integration connecting multiple aspects of the business thus creating a boundless or virtual workplace that can be anywhere the employee has internet access.
With innovation comes vulnerability. Data security needs constant attention and training. Businesses are failing to consider the new threats that the cloud and remote workers bring. Security planning needs to evolve to protect unstructured data, awareness of shadow IT, and provide unrelenting advanced data protection for 0-day threats that could destroy the very businesses that would otherwise have benefited from the cost-effective options the cloud provides.
In 2017, we can expect to see the businesses that have held out, moving their phone systems to a hosted environment and those already in the cloud, expanding into IoT and other integration. As security issues grow, SaaS providers will compete for a market that seeks out not only convenience and low prices but also the assurance of PCI and HIPAA compliance and proactive security defenses
