Key Trends that will Expand Horizons of Cloud Computing in 2017

Enterprises are rapidly acquiring cloud capabilities to stay ahead of competition and provide enhanced customer experience. Cloud computing has been in the forefront of modern technologies that have been able to transform a multitude of organizations over the past five years.

It is now established that adoption of cloud services is not driven by cost considerations alone. Enterprises are getting ready to enter into the new digital era with help of cloud based solutions.

Considering these factors, the entire market of cloud computing is set to accelerate further in 2017. The major growth drivers of cloud computing are going to be complex workloads, large enterprises and big data centers that are convinced about cloud’s ability to run core business applications.

Cloud adoption is witnessing encouraging signs with an extensive acceptance of different cloud delivery models including, private cloud, public cloud, and hybrid cloud. Predictions for cloud in 2017 are described here.

Mega cloud providers to play important role

The current compound annual cloud growth rate of 22 percent is mainly attributed to the major cloud providers including IBM, Google, and Microsoft. These mega cloud providers are rapidly acquiring huge capabilities by opening new data centers, inking deals to meet cloud requirements of different countries, and so forth.

There will be a considerable void created due the fact that the mega cloud hosting providers will find it difficult to reach grass roots for meeting individual needs of enterprises. This will open up new business avenues for regional players in cloud market to analyze cloud adoption. According to Bartoletti, enterprises need to be open to access cloud services from multiple providers.

Managing cloud costs

According a common understanding, public cloud helps reduce cloud investment. Although it may be true to some extent, in reality organizations have invested in complex cloud capabilities and the option of public availing cloud for cost saving does not hold water.

Cost containment through cloud consumption monitoring will have to be undertaken by executives in 2017. This will help keep costs under control with further support from cost management tools such as Cloudyn, AWS, or Cloudability.  

Lift and shift migration of apps

There is need to leverage services to migrate refactor apps instead of dumping for running in public cloud environment. You can exploit cloud’s elasticity by choosing the optimum option to move an application by rewriting, in spite of the costs involved in lift and shift migration.

There will be a greater acceleration of lift and shift migration for boosting rate of cloud adoption. The costs can also be controlled due to the economies of scale.

Promising development of Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Many CIOs are averse to accept hazards of entrusting their sensitive data and customers to public cloud providers. It is well accepted fact that similar to public cloud, private cloud services need resource monitoring, private service access, automation, standardization, and advanced virtualization. It is overwhelming to combine these capabilities to build an integrated system of public and private cloud.

This brings us to Hyperconverged Infrastructure that holds lot of promise by providing pre-integrated storage as well as compute power to accelerate implementation of cloud services of enterprises. Hyperconverged Infrastructure acts as a robust foundation for demanding and new workloads that require automated scalability.  This can make HCI as a default platform for building private component of hybrid cloud infrastructure.

Emergence of containers

Cloud apps development can be remarkably supported by containers for software code management. In the early phase of 2017, we can witness extensive availability of Linux containers in public as well as private platforms. These will power micro-services development as the developers will access these for direct consumption to build their own stacks.  

This will result in new challenges in terms of new security protocols, and new issues in terms of monitoring, networking, and storage. It is expected that companies will have to acquire on-premise private SaaS as well as managed public cloud development platform.

Entry of enterprise apps in public cloud

It is observed that many organizations are increasingly adopting public cloud for hosting enterprise applications. This is certainly a good sign since it implies that enterprises are coming to terms with abilities and security aspects of public cloud.

This trend is going to consolidate further in 2017 as more and more organizations start accessing public cloud to run critical software including SAP, ERP, and many more in public cloud. In terms of speed of development and insights, cloud can offer excellent support to development initiatives of organizations.

Cloud hosting solutions can be relied upon to transform amazing ideas into software applications faster than traditional methods. This will result in faster and more extensive use of public as well as private cloud with immense backing from Hyperconverged Infrastructure.

Takeaway

Having witnessed transformation of organizations with help of cloud solutions, we are on the verge of second wave of cloud adoption, which is going to boost public as well as private cloud solutions that are built and hosted in enterprise data centers.