What do Virtualization and Cloud executives think about 2012? Find out in this VMblog.com series exclusive.

2012 Cloud Predictions

Contributed Article by Kamesh Pemmaraju, Head of Marketing, Cloud Technology Partners (cloudTP)

As IT and business executives begin "bet-your-career" moves to implement cloud initiatives at their companies, they will need to keep the following industry trends in mind to maximize their chances of success and reap the full cloud benefits of business agility and cost savings. Based on our experience with current customer engagements and their roadmaps for the next year, we believe companies will be drive the following types of cloud initiatives in 2012: 

Companies will move forward rapidly with Infrastructure and Application Rationalization using Public and Private clouds

Enterprises will accelerate their initiatives to identify, rationalize, and consolidate both their infrastructure and application portfolios in preparation for their move to the cloud. Subsequently, they will identify applications that are best suited for cloud deployments and deploy them to appropriate cloud  destinations. Some enterprises are already doing this today:

Public clouds: Companies will move light-weight custom applications to public PaaS and IaaS to get their feet wet. They will also look for readily available SaaS applications for non-core applications to replace their legacy on-premise packaged applications. 

Private clouds: Core business applications that are strategic and use sensitive data will stay on-premise. Companies will begin initiatives to build private clouds to optimize their infrastructure and move these core applications to these private clouds.  

Customers Should Be Aware of Vendor Lock-in and Lack of Maturity of Cloud Tools 

Enterprise customers are not ready to accept proprietary lock-in of the past several decades. They want choice and options that can best serve their business needs. Cloud vendors will try and develop their own standards-as we have seen in the past-to differentiate and capture the market share, while locking in their customers into their proprietary standards. Unfortunately, proprietary standards are worse and history has proven that the half-life of such standards tends to be very short anyway. 

Open source, open standards initiatives such as OpenStack will gain traction. Open Stack presents  the opportunity to drive wider adoption of a single open standards based cloud stack with an opinionated architecture that encourages alignment amongst a number of service providers and enterprises in
terms of API's, delivery mechanisms, architectures, and hypervisors. While the OpenStack technologies are not fully baked, the OpenStack community-backed by big players like Rackspace, Dell, and HP-will try hard in 2012 to gain customer mindshare and dollars. 

The biggest problem that is holding back implementations of the Enterprise cloud are lack of good administrative tools. This has been a problem in the virtualization space outside of VMWare, but it is worse in the Cloud technology arena.  We will see more tools marketed to address this in the coming year. 

"Rogue" IT will Drive the need for Tighter Governance 

Enterprise business unit managers and application developers are turning to cloud applications and infrastructure to shorten time to market, save on capital expenditures and reduce overall operational costs, yet these applications and cloud infrastructure are often employed without consulting other enterprise
functions that need to be involved including finance, and IT departments. The disconnect between IT, finance, procurement, developers, and business units will cause control, security, management, and financial headaches for the CIO and the CFO. Often, the IT and finance departments will first discover this use or "Rogue" IT when they are asked to pay for, support or integrate them with other resources or applications. 

In 2012, we will see many of cloud initiatives back under the governance of the IT organization in some way. Companies will be forced to put strong governance frameworks and associated tools in place to bring some semblance of control and visibility as applications and infrastructure moves to the cloud outside the company's firewall.

Adoption of Community Clouds Will Be Slow But Will Gain Traction in Some Industries

Community Clouds allow sharing of infrastructure, applications, and other services by several organizations of a specific industry vertical or specific community that have similar security, policy, or compliance requirements. With policy-based collaboration, these organizations can ensure high levels of trust
and security while reaping the cost benefits of multi-tenancy and re-usable shared software. We will begin to see the emergence of larger community clouds across industry verticals.  Specifically, global 2000 enterprises in industry verticals such as financial services, health care, and government can benefit
the most by better use of their vast investments in datacenter footprints and shared concerns around regulatory compliance, security and privacy needs, and the need for transparent operations. 

Community clouds will be slower to take off than private clouds. The fundamental issues come down to the lack of tool maturity and organizational readiness. The following issues apply to private clouds as well but are magnified in the context of a community cloud: 

• Tools: for building infrastructure and platforms for private and community cloud have to mature to a point where they are able to handle enterprise scale workloads and reliability/availability requirements. While the cloud infrastructure space is rapidly maturing with solutions from major players such as VMWare, Rackspace , Citrix, IBM, CA, EMC, etc, the Platform-as-a-Service space for private and community clouds is still relatively immature.  
• Organizational readiness: Companies need to make organizational changes to meet the different technology model of the Cloud.  Traditional IT organizations will struggle to make the transition to a more agile environment where operations and development (DevOps) will be more closely aligned. We will see companies realize the need for this and they will start merging and changing their organizations to support their cloud initiatives.

Service-Oriented-Architecture Will Become Critical in a Cloud Era 

If companies toss projects into the cloud without a strategic business-focused enterprise architectural approach based on SOA best practices, they are very likely to end up with a siloed system that is fragmented and can later cause more headaches and issues with governance, security, integration, and
migration. 

As mentioned earlier, there isn't much notion of governance, control, or implementation of policies in cloud computing today. But when companies consider public cloud services that extend beyond their firewall, they need to pay even more attention and care re-architecting their applications so that they can securely connect and abstract out services, processes, and data-both from inside and outside of their firewall. 

Cost Reduction and Mobility Needs Will Drive Faster Adoption of Desktop Virtualization

As the workforce becomes increasingly mobile, enterprises will need figure out how to provide faster and secure ubiquitous access to company data, services, and applications. Furthermore, the availability of high-end mobile devices (smart phones, tablets etc) and the fast pace of change in that space drives many companies to consider a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) to work model to reduce the cost of supporting the devices. Now that Citrix, VMware and others are making the virtual desktop more secure and robust, companies will begin to roll out a desktop virtualization strategy. Using this strategy, a desktop in a home, for example, can become the means of mobility, in addition to other mobile devices as they become more powerful. The employee accesses corporate applications virtually, and the company maintains control over the applications' security.  

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About the Author

Kamesh Pemmaraju, Head of Marketing, Cloud Technology Partners (cloudTP). 

With over 25+ years experience in hi-tech product engineering, security, and quality assurance, Kamesh Pemmaraju, is a well known and respected cloud computing strategy, roadmap and implementation advisor, who currently serves as Head of Marketing for Cloud Technology Partners (cloudTP).