Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2015. Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed article by Yuri Sagalov, CEO of AeroFS
A Cloudy Forecast: 2015 Cloud Predictions
As
we come towards the end of Q4, 2014, now is a good time to look at the emerging
trends for 2015, and maybe even make some predictions.
Earlier
this year I noted
that the explosion of the private cloud is going to be hard to ignore for
software vendors and enterprises. In
fact, since making some of those statements back in June, interest in the
private cloud has continued to grow exponentially, and as of November searches
for OpenStack now eclipse searches for Amazon's EC2 with no signs of stopping.
So what does this mean for enterprises?
1. Most
large enterprises will deploy a private cloud by the end of 2015.
In a
report published in October, 2013, Gartner noted that 50% of polled enterprises
had deployed a private cloud in some capacity. They predicted this trend to
continue through 2014, and we predict that by the end of 2015 private cloud
computing will be the de-facto standard for companies that need to maintain
control over their data.
2. Many,
if not most, of these private clouds will be powered by OpenStack.
OpenStack is emerged as the
only standard that matters in private cloud computing. Competing solutions such
as Apache's CloudStack and the myriad of solutions from other vendors such as
VMWare simply have not picked up adoption. This year, companies like Cisco and
HP have thrown their weight behind OpenStack (Cisco with the acquisition of
MetaCloud, and HP with the release of their own version of OpenStack, Helion).
In fact, even VMWare has jumped on the OpenStack train and officially began
supporting it. The biggest complaint that OpenStack has previously suffered
(the difficult of deployment), may finally be addressed with the $100M
investment in Mirantis, an OpenStack vendor that offers turnkey deployments.
3. Enterprises
will increasingly expect a choice of deployment model for their SaaS
applications: Public Cloud or Private Cloud.
If
we believe the first two points to be true, the natural thing for IT
organizations to focus on next would be the cloud
applications they use. IT administrators
will increasingly expect software vendors to provide both public cloud and
private cloud versions of their software. This will particularly be true with
software that interacts with PCI, PHI, or generally confidential information
such as collaboration software.
The
increasing adoption of the private cloud means that the word "cloud" is about
to undergo another change and most likely come back to it's original meaning.
Utilizing the "cloud" will no longer mean simply using Amazon's EC2 or
Microsoft's Azure, and instead it will once again mean utilizing the power of
elasticity and enabling better resource utilization whether you're using your
own data centers or someone else's.
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About the Author
Yuri
Sagalov is the CEO and co-founder of AeroFS, which he started with his
co-founder and CTO Weihan Wang in 2010. He graduated from the University of
Toronto's elite Engineering Science program, majoring in Computer Engineering.
Yuri was studying towards a Masters of Applied Science focusing on Distributed
Systems at the University of Toronto before taking a leave of absence to start
AeroFS.