Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022. Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Peering Ahead Through The Cloud
By Kash Shaikh, President and CEO, Virtana
Seminal science fiction writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke, who predicted the world wide web decades before its advent, once observed that “trying to predict the future is a discouraging, hazardous occupation.” Fortunately, predicting the near-term future of the cloud computing sector appears to be a bit less hazardous. As no technology sector develops in a vacuum, we can project with a high degree of confidence this sector’s shorter-term trajectory by identifying both the challenges and opportunities it now faces.
The challenges and opportunities in the cloud space today can help us foresee how businesses will operate in the cloud space tomorrow-and what solutions they will likely employ to surmount those challenges and to seize those opportunities.
The opportunities that the cloud can potentially offer businesses and their IT operations will remain the same: new cost savings, greater mobility, scalability, and security.
Indeed, the cloud sector is just one part of a rapidly growing sharing economy that offers business and consumers the attractive feature of flexibility in selecting from a menu of desired services without having to own, and sometimes maintain, products or physical things. Netflix and Amazon Prime are Exhibit A. They offer video entertainment most consumers desire while relieving them of the need to purchase DVRs and DVDs-something that consumers have found virtually irresistible.
In November 2021, Virtana issued the report, State of Hybrid Cloud and FinOps 2021. Of 350 cloud decision makers surveyed, 70% consider silos across teams an impediment in their ability to maximize business value.
As this research demonstrates, there will continue to be a pressing need for those invested in the cloud to make it work better for their respective businesses, finding new cost efficiencies and generating improved outcomes. We can anticipate that these needs will drive an era of expanding cloud arbitrage characterized by any-cloud-to any-cloud workload placements for cost optimization and higher performance.
We should fix our eyes on other key cloud trends next year and beyond:
Cloud Arbitrage To Address Public Cloud Flexibility, Scale and Cost Challenges
The public cloud has been flexible in that it allows enterprises to quickly scale up and scale down, which was a running theme this past year due to COVID. By leveraging public cloud, companies scaled without needing to worry about the myriad of challenges in running an on-premises data center, from drive capacity to cooling, to energy use and more. The ability to “flex up” has made the public cloud flexible, but its inability to “flex down” has made it inflexible- because there has been little or no secondary cloud market.
In addition, they say you are crazy if you don’t start in the cloud; you’re crazy if you stay on it. Public cloud delivers on its promise early on in the lifecycle of a company; however, as a company scales, it becomes cost prohibitive. This happens later in a company’s life, so it is difficult to reverse.
There is ample reason to believe that the coming year will be a transition year as the public cloud becomes more flexible and cost-effective at scale. It will be driven by two trends: more cloud providers and more co-location options resulting in healthy competition – meaning more options for the customers to leverage cloud arbitrage to drive down the cost.
Containerization
Containers offer IT organizations a dedicated space to build, test, and deploy new applications. The technology enables faster delivery, agility, portability, and modernization. By 2022, Gartner estimates more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production, up from less than 30% today.
Serverless Design
Users do not need to lease servers or pay for fixed amounts of storage or compute so infrastructure scales invisibly as an application requires it. So, is it really serverless? Not really, the servers are there; however, it adds a layer of abstraction between the user and the platform, so the user doesn’t have to worry about technical details of servers, and it offers easy operational management and no system administration.
Artificial Intelligence
Cloud computing is enabling artificial intelligence (AI) services. Google CEO Sundar Pichai described AI as “more profound than electricity or fire” in terms of the effect it will have on society. AI platforms require tremendous processing power and data bandwidth for training and processing data, and cloud data centers make this available to anyone.
Cloud Security
It is a shared responsibility to protect data in the cloud and on premises between organizations and cloud service providers. As the cloud sector continues its vigorous growth-bringing in more stakeholders with more IP at stake-security will only rise in importance.
Edge Computing
Edge computing brings data processing-collection, storage, and analysis-closer to the sources generating the data, rather than a centralized cloud. This reduces latency and powers the use of edge devices. Gartner predicts that 75% of business-generated data will be created and processed outside of a centralized cloud by 2025.
Open Source
Open-source software is a great way to be flexible, cost-effective, and avoid what could be costly vendor lock-in.
Faster time-to-market along with increased security are important considerations. Open-source projects are usually inspected by many different contributors, leading to increased code quality and no secret backdoors or vulnerabilities.
As we project the future of the cloud, perhaps we should remember that old idiom about “having your head in the clouds”-meaning someone who is a daydreamer out of touch with practical reality.
Success in the cloud for organizations of all stripes in the years ahead will absolutely require advanced planning firmly grounded in reality to ensure that a cloud presence fits right with their operations and missions. That is one prediction we can make with utmost certainty.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kash Shaikh is CEO and President of Virtana, an AI-powered observability and optimization platform for migrating, optimizing, and monitoring applications across any cloud environment.
