What can you expect in the year ahead? Multi-cloud and containers loom large, IT leaders and cloud experts say
Cloud computing may be the new normal, but that certainly doesn’t mean it’s static. Rather, cloud and related technologies, practices, and culture – think containers, microservices architecture, DevOps, and the like – will continue to change at a breakneck pace.
With 2018 upon us, we asked a range of IT leaders and cloud experts to dust off their crystals balls and share what they’re expecting for cloud and related areas in the year ahead. Read on for five cloud forecasts for IT leaders and their organizations to watch:
1. Multi-cloud goes mainstream – and open source is the portability enabler
Heptio CEO and co-founder Craig McLuckie, one of the original developers of Kubernetes, believes 2018 will be the year when multi-cloud strategies become the norm in IT, especially as organizations that now feel confident with their initial, single cloud environment look to add a second (or third, or….you get the idea.)
“Most enterprises now have workloads running in the cloud, and many are starting to evaluate who their second cloud provider will be,” McLuckie says.
As Alessandro Perilli, Red Hat GM, management strategy, pointed out earlier this year, this is a natural and advisable execution of a multi-cloud, multi-vendor strategy:
“Start by managing each vendor individually – most companies start in this way – for a quick return on investment and to build up the expertise necessary for the next phases,” Perilli advises.
McLuckie notes that the reasons for looking to expand to other platforms and environments vary by organization, they all lead to the same basic result: Multi-cloud. “In some cases it is simply a question of procurement policy – few companies of scale can afford to rely on a single provider. In other cases organizations see potential quality of service, capability, or price advantages in solutions offered by other providers.”
To achieve those and other benefits – workload portability and optimization come to mind – open source will need to play a starring role, McLuckie says.
“Open source technology by its nature will emerge as an important consideration as it represents a powerful way to avoid vendor lock-in to a specific environment,” he explains. “More sophisticated organizations will start to value building stronger relationships with open source communities directly as a way to meet their needs.”
2. IT turns from cloud adoption to cloud optimization
2018 also appears poised to be a phase when the cloud narrative shifts from adoption to optimization, according to Jeff Budge, VP of advisory consulting and product management at OneNeck IT Solutions.
“Optimization will appear in many different dimensions, including cost, multi-cloud governance and management, and data optimization,” Budge says.
Cloud costs are already a major topic, but Budge expects IT leaders to laser in on their optimization and management next year, particularly as cloud strategies mature.
Similarly, with multi-cloud environments proliferating, there will be increasing emphasis on all of the issues that fall under the broad header of: How the heck do we manage all of this?
“As customers have progressed in their cloud journey, they have come to realize it will require a mix of cloud types to meet their company’s needs,” Budge says. “In the current day, that generally means administration and management of this mix of clouds involves ‘chair swiveling’ from cloud console to cloud console.”
Budge predicts there will be a lot of buzz in the “single pane of glass” cloud management tools space next year.
In particular, Budge expects data optimization across a diverse cloud portfolio to become a top priority: “Data integration, data sovereignty, data security, data encryption, data, data, data,” Budge says. “As companies are identifying the right cloud mix for their application portfolio, there will be a huge push on the implications of data.”
Article Credit: The Enterprisers Project
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