Contributed article by Dave LeClair, Senior Director, Strategy, Stratus Technologies

Five cloud predictions you may not have considered for 2014

Tired of the cloud-washing that's gone on over the past year? You're not alone. Some claim cloud computing has been around forever - even going as far back as the digital computer itself. So nothing is really new, right? Wrong.

Today's innovative cloud technologies are poised to transform not just the data center, but also business itself. We are about to see business and revenue models emerge that were never before possible without cloud computing. So what specifically will we see in 2014? Here are five predictions you may not have considered... until now.

1. Availability and reliability of applications will finally take center stage. 2014 marks the year the security obstacle takes a back seat to these other factors that are truly emerging as the new challenge. The large enterprise companies I talk to are planning to move 5,000 - even as many as 7,000 applications - to the cloud. These IT departments can't possibly rewrite all these applications to be cloud-aware so they'll need a way to build reliability, availability and compliance capabilities into their infrastructure and they'll start to demand this capability from their cloud partners.


2. To remain relevant, IT will need to speak in terms LOBs can understand. Shadow IT is happening because IT is not responding to the business fast enough nor in a way they can understand. For example, "5,9s" reliability is a common concept for IT - we all know this translates to about five minutes of downtime per year; but, it's not a term LOB executives, who control more of the IT spend, care about. They think in terms like: "What didn't happen?" or "How much business did I lose." In 2014, expect more cloud tools to be far more user-friendly than they are today to offer parameters where LOB leaders can self-select how mission critical an application is, and the technology just happens at the back end.


3. Cloud is at an inflection point giving rise to new, short term opportunities. No one is arguing cloud is bringing on a cycle of innovation that will only be limited by our imaginations. But, what does this inflection point mean in the short term? From my conversations with customers, I see cloud hardware and software being applied to specific workloads. We are getting to a state of cloud optimization we haven't seen before. Companies won't need to settle for a one size fits all approach to application management. We are even seeing optimization on a per workload basis. Imagine having the availability you need at the right time or per workload and even applying that availability dynamically? Say you are a bank and you don't use a particular application but for one week a year, but during that one week, its mission critical and your entire business depends on it. The short term opportunity I see will allow you to move these workloads around and put them in different environments - and that's cool.


4. A software-defined layer will build better clouds.  My point above won't be possible without abstracting availability and putting it in its own layer, between the application layer and the hardware layer without compromising reliability - and this movement will happen. One of the most remarkable outcomes from the Netflix outage last year at this time was Amazon's response to the issue, who essentially said Netflix should have designed its streaming application to automatically fail-over to better failover to a back-up system when Amazon had an issue in their datacenter. Well, software-defined availability would build this resilience into the cloud.


5. SLAs will get an overhaul - for real.  I used to work in telephony and SLAs in our industry remind me of commercials that were big a few years ago. Remember those Verizon ads where the caller would move two feet and ask, "Can you hear me now?"  The fact that it still worked was a differentiator for Verizon in the early days of mobile communications.  People were willing to accept frequent dropped calls and poor audio quality for the new benefit of being able to do business anywhere. Well, cloud has been similar in that we've been so excited about the flexibility, agility and cost-savings we've achieved, we've put up with inadequate SLAs, just as callers put up with dropped calls. Eventually mobile users required reliable networks that didn't drop calls.  Likewise, today's cloud vendors only pay a few cents worth of credit when they have outages that may cause your business thousands of dollars of downtime costs. But, in 2014, we believe IT customers will demand more resiliency or they'll go somewhere else. To be successful, vendors will need to step up their guarantees and insurances or risk customer churn.

Buckle up, everyone, I am expecting 2014 to be the year we get grounded and down to business when it comes to cloud-and for those who recognize its potential to change the competitive landscape-it should be a very interesting year.

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