The ubiquity of cloud platforms and infrastructures 

The other key aspect is to have reliable, available, scalable, and secure IT environments (cloud and non-cloud). We talked about producing versatile software packages and libraries. We also talked about setting up and sustaining appropriate IT infrastructures for successfully running various kinds of IT and business applications. Increasingly, the traditional data centers and server farms are being modernized through the smart application of cloud-enablement technologies and tools. The cloud idea establishes and enforces IT rationalization, the heightened utilization of IT resources, and optimization. There is a growing number of massive public cloud environments (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google cloud, IBM cloud, and Oracle cloud) that are encompassing thousands of commodity and high-end server machines, storage appliance arrays, and networking components to accommodate and accomplish the varying IT needs of the whole world. Government organizations, business behemoths, various service providers, and institutions are empowering their own IT centers into private cloud environments. Then, on an as-needed basis, private clouds are beginning to match the various capabilities of public clouds to meet specific requirements. In short, cloud environments are being positioned as the one-stop IT solution for our professional, social, and personal IT requirements.

The cloud is becoming pervasive with the unique contributions of many players from the IT industry, worldwide academic institutions, and research labs. We have plenty of private, public, and hybrid cloud environments. The surging popularity of fog/edge computing leads to the formation of fog/edge device clouds, which are contributing immensely to produce people-centric and real-time applications. The fog or edge device computing is all about leveraging scores of connected and capable devices to form a kind of purpose-specific as well as agnostic device cloud to collect, cleanse and crunch sensor, actuator, device, machine, instrument, and equipment poly-structured and real-time data emanating from all sorts of physical, mechanical, and electrical systems on the ground. With the projected billions of connected devices, the future beckons and bats for device clusters and clouds. Definitely, the cloud movement has penetrated every industry and the IT phenomenon is redefined and resuscitated by the roaring success of the cloud. Soon, cloud applications, platforms, and infrastructures will be everywhere. IT is all set to become the fifth social utility. The pertinent and paramount challenge is how to bring forth deeper and decisive automation in the cloud IT space.

The need for deeply automated and adaptive cloud centers with clouds emerging as the most flexible, futuristic, and fabulous IT environments to host and run IT and business workloads, there is a rush for bringing as much automation as possible to speed up the process of cloud migration, software deployment and delivery, cloud monitoring, measurement and management, cloud integration and orchestration, cloud governance and security, and so on. There are several trends and transitions happening simultaneously in the IT space to realize these goals.