By 2050, the world’s population is set to reach approximately 10 billion people, with the largest number being concentrated in urban centres. This will increase the need for advanced digital solutions to manage the population. Cloud will provide the digital infrastructure of tomorrow’s cities, where an estimated 6 billion of the world’s population will live by 2045. Smart elevators and parking lots, driverless cars and drone taxis, trains and subways, farms and power plants — all will be safer and better managed, thanks to the cloud’s ability to store and analyze data.
The cloud will also be transformative for companies, especially small and mid-sized businesses, as data analytics, artificial intelligence and other capabilities become available as services. Because each industry has different needs, Huawei, a global tech company where I head up the communications team, is working on what we call the Industry Cloud: thousands of distinct, separate clouds, all working in concert across a digital ecosystem of different industry verticals.
For example:
- A commercial aviation cloud will help airlines manage ground operations such as maintenance, fueling, baggage handling, and cabin cleaning, thereby increasing efficiency and helping flights take off on time.
- A utilities cloud will automatically repair faults in the power grid to ensure that homes and businesses get the electricity they need.
- A banking cloud will let financial institutions scan thousands of transactions per second to prevent fraud.
Regardless of industry or size, all companies need digital infrastructure to support their business operations. But the cloud will change ICT from a support system into a production system. For example, OpenDesk, a London-based company, uploads furniture designs to the cloud and lets customers download the designs and manufacture the furniture locally. This lowers shipping and inventory costs, while reducing the company’s carbon footprint.
Although the cloud is far from a new idea, its true capabilities are only now beginning to be realized. Here are four ways in which the cloud will shape our lives over the next decade and beyond.
Building the digital infrastructure of tomorrow’s cities
Smart cities used to be a distant dream, often perceived as fantasy seen in movies and book. But what if I told you we are closer to achieving it than you imagine? It is estimated that, by 2050, 66% of the global population will live in urban areas, with much of the urban growth concentrating on developing regions, particularly Africa. The cities of tomorrow will be founded on digital infrastructures and it is estimated that 6 billion people will inhabit them by 2045. But what does cloud computing have to do with it?
If we want to have smart elevators, autonomous cars, drone deliveries and smart farms, then we need a virtual place to store all this data – enter the cloud. All of these devices and many more will be better managed, safer and easier to use, all thanks to the cloud and its ability to not only store massive amounts of data, but also analyze it.
Many companies, including Huawei, are working to create something called Industry Cloud, which involves multiple separate clouds that work together inside a digital ecosystem. This means each industry gets its own designated cloud, which governments and businesses can use to deliver better services to citizens.
Managing Data
The cloud will also help society cope with growing volumes of data. This includes applications like high-definition video, which Huawei estimates will account for 89% of individual user traffic by 2025.
Soon, network bandwidth and storage requirements will be driven less by user-generated cat videos and more by what IDC’s Data Age 2025 white paper calls “image and video content for non-entertainment purposes.” Examples include advertising and video recordings used in public safety applications. IDC also cites “productivity-driven” data such as files on PCs and servers; meta-data about digital files and web pages; and data created by machine-to-machine communications in the Internet of Things. Cloud will enable us to store this rising tide of data and mine it for usable insights.
Artificial Intelligence
The cloud will support emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and help them to adapt to new platforms such as mobile. When smartphone sales overtook sales of PCs in 2011, mobile became the world’s largest computing platform. Naturally, AI has made its way into phones.
But smartphones capture lots of unstructured data such as emails, text messages and photos. Analyzing unstructured data takes time and processing power that most smartphones don’t have, so the phones have to send the data to powerful servers in the cloud. This slows down AI’s response time.
The solution: divide the labor between the cloud and the phone. Training, the process whereby AI learns, happens in the cloud. When Google’s AI algorithm plays millions of games of Go with itself until it becomes a grand master capable of defeating a human, it does so in the cloud, where processing power is abundant and AI learns quickly. Inference, where the AI takes what it has learned and applies it to real-life problems, happens on the device. Smartphones will use inference continuously, according to research sponsored by Huawei. This always-on intelligence will enable the device to respond immediately to voice commands; ensure that photos are cataloged according to content; and set cameras perfectly for different subjects under various shooting conditions.
Because inference needs to process data in real time, all the time, even tomorrow’s super-advanced smartphones won’t be able to meet the computing demands imposed by AI. They’ll have to rely on the processing power of the cloud.
Autonomous Vehicles
The vision of driverless cars gliding down streets and highways is still a ways off, but it will be realized soon, thanks to the power of the cloud. As with smartphones, vehicles come with sensors and cameras that generate plenty of data. Much of that data needs to be processed in real time, so pressing will take place on, or inside of, the vehicle itself. But many tasks, such as software updates and machine learning, will happen in the cloud.
In particular, video will feature prominently in tomorrow’s vehicles, providing in-car entertainment, enhancing road safety by allowing drivers to “see through” other vehicles, and making cars more secure. To thwart burglars, vandals and car thieves, many cars now have multiple security cameras. Video footage can be stored on a secure digital card inside the car or beamed up to the cloud.
In the future, we can only expect to see more of these cloud-based entertainment platforms, on any niche you can imagine.
References
- Cloud Computing Is Crucial To The Future Of Our Societies – https://www.forbes.com/sites/joytan/2018/02/25/cloud-computing-is-the-foundation-of-tomorrows-intelligent-world/?sh=690e44664073
- Building the digital infrastructure of tomorrow’s cities – https://www.techzone360.com/topics/techzone/articles/2020/06/24/445798-cloud-computing-it-be-key-the-future-our.htm
