Farewell 2018, Hello 2019: The last 12 months in cloud – and what’s on the horizon

2018 was yet another fascinating year when it came to cloud computing, along with the emerging technologies which complement and rely on the cloud.

As the ecosystem has matured and organisations’ confidence has increased, conversations have shifted gear accordingly. RightScale’s State of the Cloud report for 2018 back in February found that for every enterprise which hadn’t dipped its toes in one of the major cloud vendor offerings, there were at least two who had. In one of the more outlandish predictions from last year, a report from Citrix in July argued that, by 2025, the term ‘cloud’ will have gone the way of ‘internet’ et al, its ubiquity forcing a semantic sea-change.

With that in mind, what were the key trends of last year? In many ways, they were variations on previous themes. Below, CloudTechexplores some of the stories which shaped 2018, and predictions from industry executives on what may happen in 2019.