Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2013. Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed article by Bertrand Hazard, Senior Director, Market Strategist, SolarWinds
If the Mayans are Wrong, Here's What 2013 will Hold for Virtualization
In 2013, it will be important for IT professionals to
continue to define their roles. 2013's changes will be evolutionary instead of
revolutionary, as they've been in recent years. We'll see the pace of
conversion from client-server architecture to cloud-based
architecture. IT professionals can no longer ignore the capabilities of
externally hosted SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS solutions and must begin to build their
skills around the cloud. Just as virtualization brought us abstraction of
physical resources, the cloud is introducing abstraction of the entire data
center.
IT professionals will need to build their capabilities and
their organizations around an "IT as a broker" model, in which internal IT pros
at the organizational level will consult with business units to determine the
best, most cost-effective deployment and administration models for new and
existing applications. This means that IT must be versed in the long-term
effects of moving to specific cloud platforms.
The following are a few specific things we believe the IT
professional should do to remain relevant in 2013 and in the future:
Get acquainted with
"software-defined" EVERYTHING. We're all a little bit fatigued at the
over-use of the term "cloud." So VMware started leading the charge to redefine
terms a bit to get us to take baby steps toward software-defined data centers.
This essentially means that the future is filled with lots of software-based
abstraction from physical devices. Sure, those physical devices will remain
somewhere, but the locations are becoming a lot less important. IT
professionals now need to build their skillsets more around managing resources
via software interfaces. This is really
not a major departure from the way things have been for the last several years
with the rampant use of virtualization. We'll just see it become pervasive
across other areas of the data center where it hasn't already become
mainstream.
Understand how to
address security issues. Security issues aren't just for highly-specialized
security analysts anymore. Security should be part of every IT professional's
job. Building an understanding of the security implications of different
deployment scenarios is critical to good application deployment. In most cases,
deployment of a dedicated solution in an internally-owned data center is the
most secure option, but major strides are being made toward enhanced security
in multi-tenant environments. With a number of hosted private cloud options
appearing from the likes of Rackspace, HP, and IBM, it's good to understand the
difference between each type of private, public, and hybrid deployment models
and how they will fit users' applications' security requirements.
Security can also be enhanced just by deploying some simple
tools that correlate system logs and events to uncover security breaches in
real time. Security
Information & Event Management (SIEM) tools with pre-configured rules
to help identify problems, as well as a library of active responses that allow users
to react to issues in real time thus speeding a user's response to threats to
IT security, will be a huge help to the IT generalist.
Enhance your use of
virtualization. We're carrying this prediction over from our 2012
predictions because we think it will just continue to grow! The existence of a
virtual infrastructure is table stakes in 2013. It's what you can do with
virtualization that counts. So, we'll see a renewed focus on efficient
management of virtual environments in 2013. The newness of VMware deployments
has started to wear off, and now the objective is to manage it well or even to
extend it to places like desktops where we haven't used virtualization before.
2013 will see a big acceleration in the use of advanced virtualization
management tools to make virtual environments more cloud-like. This will
include acceleration in deployments of auto-provisioning tools that allow
certain users to create and delete their own virtual machines. Some of the same
environments will increase the use of virtualization chargeback that creates a
utility billing capability for departments consuming IT resources.
Most importantly, though, IT professionals must efficiently
utilize their virtual environments. IT budgets are not growing as fast as the
need for resources. Therefore, virtual infrastructure must be streamlined and
resources should be re-provisioned to applications that need them most. Most
good Virtualization
Management and Storage
Resource Management tools provide professionals with everything they need
to manage VMware and Hyper-V environments well.
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About the Author
Bertrand Hazard is the market strategy lead for the systems
management product portfolios at SolarWinds. He has more than a decade of
experience devising and executing sales and marketing strategies in the
software industry. Bertrand earned a Bachelor's degree in International
Business studies from Middlesex University and his
Product Management & Marketing Programs Certification from Pragmatic
Marketing. You can
follow Bertrand on Twitter or reach him at Bertrand Hazard