Latin America. 2015 is a year in which cloud services will be a fundamental piece for business development and progress. For companies providing cloud services, the objective is focused on capturing new business needs that are supported from Data Centers with public, hybrid and private clouds, thus causing a growth of Data Centers throughout the Latin American region and in turn, a growth of more than 50% in the Cloud market.
Although some cloud service providers experience moderate growth and focus more on cloud evangelism, many other providers accelerate their investment plans with the goal of increasing their share of the cloud services market.
This has caused that in Latin America the cloud has evolved exponentially in recent years. Taking into account that only in the region of Mexico in 2014 an investment of $ 500 million dollars was made in the cloud and that for 2018 an investment of $ 650 million dollars is estimated, a growth of $ 150 million dollars of investment in Cloud technologies in the business and government sectors is projected.
In the case of Colombia, among the initiatives that the government carries out to contribute to connectivity with the use of Cloud services and the increase in the use of this technology, is the "Plan Vive Digital" which was designed to connect 50% of households and SMEs with an amount of 280 million dollars between 2010 and 2014
One of the important factors that has led to the growth of cloud services in Latin America is the increase in the use of these by the middle class of the population. According to studies on the growth of the use of Cloud services, it is estimated that by 2030 the middle class will represent 40% of the total population in Latin America. Because this class is the one that currently and mostly uses various cloud solutions, from emails to home product purchase services, it is possible to foresee that expansion of this class will drive growth and lead to greater adoption of cloud technology.
The growth of adoption of Cloud solutions in Latin America benefits all labor sectors, from Private Corporations, Government Institutions to SMEs. After all, these are users who require the best technological services at a lower cost, which through the cloud makes it possible to eliminate expenses and costs of operation, maintenance, repair, adaptation, guarantees, and all those technical emergencies that come to arise day by day.
In turn, the use of Cloud brings great benefits specifically for companies that decide to implement solutions of this type, since it contributes to the reduction of the technological payroll specialized in physical infrastructure, increasing specialized services in the cloud, whether public, private or hybrid, according to the specific needs of each company. Due to today's dynamics, one of the main challenges is to choose which Cloud solution best suits the business unit and the support of the workload of each company.
On the other hand, the cloud provides high levels of performance and benefits for the management of business applications and the replacement of Legacy software of each company, all this through custom developments and cloud formations associated with the core business of the company. The new protection and quality policies in Cloud services provide total security in the use of cloud applications through robust teams in logical and perimeter security, without blocking the innovation and ease of use of Cloud services.
By presenting this wide range of benefits, Latin American countries will maintain efforts aimed at the cloud and future services such as the Internet of Things, thus anticipating that business applications in the cloud will grow by around 18% in 2015 and that private sectors such as computing and electronics, telecommunications and media, automotive manufacturing, chemicals, aerospace manufacturing, transportation and logistics, real estate, the hotel industry, and financial and insurance services grew by 30% to 80%.
Due to the technological evolution that Cloud Computing has experienced at a global level, companies in Latin America are investing in this technology platform, considering it essential to improve their competitiveness and a strategy in reducing internal expenses in information technologies. Likewise, an analysis by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) estimates that 39% of the software of large companies in Latin America is hosted in the cloud. For this reason, CIOs should evaluate factors such as security, reliability, service level review (SLA), service coverage, return on investment, cost reduction, and technology expenses when implementing a cloud strategy.
Cloud service providers, such as Praxis, must be aware of the needs of their customers so that they can select a wide range of products and services in the cloud that are aimed at delivering reliable and robust services that allow them to focus on their priorities, improve the quality of their operation, increase the reliability of systems in production and generate savings in current technical processes.
Text written by Jafet Valdez, Manager of praxis' Cloud Specialty
