A great deal has been written over the past few years about the financial benefit of migrating to the public or hybrid cloud for enterprises around the world. For enterprise looking for economic benefits of moving to the cloud, the main points have always been the ability to only pay for what you need, reduced operational cost, agility, availability, and elasticity. Enterprises are discovering new models for doing business based on their transition to the cloud. Individual enterprises are developing these new models and, as will be discussed below, finding new means of collaboration with partners and even former competitors. This can lead to major shifts in global industries’ business models as well as the individual enterprise.

As business models shift based on cloud technologies and collaboration, and data sharing becomes the norm, an atmosphere of cooperation/competition can emerge. This is as opposed to the strictly competitive atmosphere that exists today. The best example of a leading indicator is the air of cooperation, at the cloud orchestration and container support layers, between public cloud providers. Instead of expending resources to develop their own methodologies, creating barriers for themselves and their competitors, the cloud’s inherent data sharing capabilities can securely share information that eventually all the entities involved would have anyway. This type of collaboration could change the face of major industries.

In a world where international security entities are scrambling to ‘know’ where the next threat is coming from, information is paramount. Instead of taking years in creating complex interfaces between nation based systems, placing common information in a highly-secured, globally distributed, continuously updated, cloud-based service would be of greater benefit.

Furthermore, the rise of cloud-based technologies, such as microservices architectures and automated sending of cloud-based resources, are playing a major role in the speed and volume aspects of global transactions.

Cloud technologies have the potential to change not only the way enterprises do business, but possibly whole industries.