The public cloud brings important operational efficiencies – The availability of countless new services that can be leveraged by the enterprise, the agility to expand or shrink quickly to keep pace with the needs of the enterprise, and the global presence and scale of public clouds that enables enterprise to run workloads anywhere in the world with reasonable latency.
With those benefits in mind, here are three predictions for the cloud computing in 2018.
I. We will see a large number of enterprises conducting massive migrations of thousands of workloads per enterprise into the public cloud.
Enterprises realize that if they can shift their resources away from maintaining and managing massive data-centers into focusing their resources on their core competency, they would be much more competitive in their respective markets, and eventually more cost-effective as well.
Paul Tucker, Head of the Data Center Closure Project claims, “The migration of our applications to the cloud was proving a considerable challenge – a lengthy and costly process. We needed something that was quicker, easily repeatable, created minimal system downtime and provided assurance to business users that all data would be migrated.”
II. The majority of enterprises that will migrate to cloud at scale, will employ a multi-cloud strategy. More specifically, they will split their production workloads across more than one public cloud.
Enterprises don’t want to be locked in. If an enterprise can get significant cost reduction on infrastructure, this can mean millions of dollars in savings a year.
Furthermore, different clouds offer different innovation and functionality. Enterprises would like to use best of breed for the different workloads to take advantage of what all clouds have to offer.
Last, some industries (such as finance and healthcare, for example) are mandated to have an alternative cloud to run on. Others just want to make sure they can switch in case of security breaches, outages, or other issues that might affect a specific cloud.
Furthermore, Gartner
III. Forward thinking companies and enterprises will utilize a strategy that:
“Instead of using cloud-specific services, look for services that are available on multiple clouds and require minimal migration effort. Or, consider the impact of keeping the service running in its original cloud while running the related workloads on another cloud.
Regardless, it’s vital to employ techniques that allow for the simple and fast mobilization of workloads across clouds with minimal disruption to downtime or re-configuration/re-write efforts.
Last, use orchestration and management frameworks that interface to the native cloud management systems but operate uniformly across clouds.”
