Two years back, Wired ran a striking headline: “The Cloud Computing Era Could Be Nearing Its End.” By this, the author recommended that cloud’s much-argued lag problem, with other things, could establish to be its downfall, and that may be an edge computing network was in order.

But, now that perspective of the future is assumed to be implausible. According to LinkedIn, the top hard skill companies are looking for in 2019 is a feature with cloud computing. In an interview  to CNBC last November, Daniel Zhang, CEO of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, said that cloud computing will become Alibaba’s “main business” as well as “every business will rely on the cloud in the future.”

In the digital world, more or less everything is now connected to the cloud in some way, with the special case being data stored locally for security reasons. LogicMonitor’s ‘Cloud Vision 2020: The Future of the Cloud’ study considered that 83 percent of project workloads will be in the cloud in a year’s time, whereas a 2018 SmartCompany report found that cloud technology came next to smartphones as far as impact on business competence over the past five years. And my own company — a SaaS service for dry cleaners and laundromats — is an example of how cloud services are already going far away from tech companies and enterprises.

In these situations, it isn’t too difficult to envisage that in the near future — maybe within five or 10 years from now — around all businesses will function primarily from the cloud, which has inferences for productivity, cost-efficiency, and flexibility.

But the cloud we may find in five to 10 years will look somewhat different from what we have now. Wait to see major changes on at least four fronts:

1.User experience

Initially, user experience will be shifted up the priority list. One of the major reasons of dominance of Apple over other smartphone market is its promise for better user experience. Steve Jobs was famously compulsive about UX, saying that “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. The design is how it works.” Now, UX continuously a key differentiator across all sectors, and in the cloud space there’s no reason to believe it will be any diverse. Those establishments and products which will thrive in a more crowded market will be those which can merge functionality with a great user experience. We’re supposed to see more consideration paid to design and to creating a “cleaner,” simpler design that will attract the average consumer habituated to basic smartphone apps and to the less digitally literate — in other words, those browbeaten by the clear complexity of cloud technology.

2.Desktop-as-a-Service

Additionally, we’re supposed to see more extensive use of Desktop-as-a-Service, which explains the operation of a virtual desktop infrastructure by a third party. For example, the personal information of employees of a business could be duplicated to and from their virtual desktop every time they log on or off, forming a virtual working environment that runs quickly, secures information dependably, and mainly organizes itself. In the meantime, access to that data, will be free of device, location, or network, which creates for effortless remote-working and a huge decrease in the likelihood of human error.

3. App-to-app incorporation

Though everything may run on the cloud, but running several clouds simultaneously can still create challenges, such as observance with data regulation. Slack — the fastest-growing Software-as-a-Service company on the planet — has by now shown how incorporation can work, and its achievement is replicated in its trial-to-paid conversion rate, which stands at 30 percent. Slack integrates with other apps like Trello, Giphy, and Simple Poll, so users can access all of them from a particular platform. This is the thing we’ll see more and more in cloud computing as players large and small hope to assist businesses and individuals to be more competent and productive.

4. Cloud as default

As increasingly, life occurs in the cloud, the term “cloud” could vanish in total. What we currently call “cloud computing” will simply be “computing.” And perhaps, by extension, “as-a-Service” will disappear, too, as SaaS replaces usual software.

In tech, you can never be sure of the direction of travel. Things change quickly and in surprising ways, and some of the changes we’ve seen over even the past 10 years would have been unimaginable only a couple of years before. But we can say with some confidence that cloud computing is not only here to stay but set to make its presence known in increasingly impactful ways as we go forward. And that’s an interesting outlook for everyone.