Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2015. Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed article by Noam Shendar is VP of Business Development at Zadara Storage
2015 Forecast – IT is Getting Very “Cloudy”
Each year, we take a
look at the trends in the industry and forecast what the upcoming year will
look like. It is never good to drive you
car by only looking in the rear-view mirror.
Running a business is no different.
We need to be looking forward, but with a proper level of attention to
our side mirrors and rear-view mirrors.
So the following is our view of what lies ahead on the road. As usual, there will be interesting scenery
as well as some unexpected obstacles.
While the forecast is "Cloudy", that isn't necessarily meant in a bad
way.
Last year's
predictions
pointed to Enterprise cloud adoption, cloud storage price drops and the massive
expansion of as-a-service offerings. For
the most part, we were right on track.
In 2015, we believe we're going to see a great maturing of cloud
services and as-a-service business models, as traditional IT models begin to
wane:
- Blurring Between
Cloud and Data Center
Organizations are
managing data across multiple physical tiers, including their on-premises data
centers, colocation facilities and the public cloud. Today, these tiers host
different types of workloads determined by security, performance, management paradigm
and budget needs. Over the coming year we'll see the differences between these tiers
shrink as more efficient, elastic, and responsive architectures will be adopted
beyond the public cloud, while the cloud will deliver more robust Enterprise
services. Moreover, the management of these tiers will become dramatically
simplified with solutions enabling a single management paradigm across all
locations.
- IT Equipment
Ownership Begins to Decline
Albeit slowly, IT
equipment ownership begins to decline as the predominant
IT standard in favor of as-a-Service approaches. As organizations contend with
growing capacity demands and a need for data center infrastructure refresh,
as-a-service models will see continuing adoption from vendors and channels
alike. New companies and startups will avoid CapEx-intensive ownership
altogether, while existing IT departments will seek to rid themselves of
maintenance headaches associated with hardware management in favor of OpEx led
infrastructure both on- and off-premises.
- ROI and TCO Lead
IT Decision Making
Staying within budget
is no longer enough. Business stakeholders want to see the ROI of every IT
investment by adopting the strategic use of cloud services to better understand
expenditures and resulting benefits. As such, we'll see organizations adopting
more sophisticated charge-back and show-back models to lift the fog off their
expenses and analyze ROI and TCO of their hardware and software infrastructure.
Understanding how departments operate and how those operations relate to their
IT costs will provide new insight into TCO and lead a more strategic approach
to IT.
- Petabytes for Pennies
- More Solutions using Commodity Hardware
With the rapid growth
of data, costs and budgets gain an even higher priority. As resources are increasingly
squeezed, any technology that makes the data center more efficient will see
increased adoption. In 2015, we will see more innovative solutions emerge that
are built on commodity hardware and low-cost interfaces to achieve greater
density and increased performance at lower costs. As hyper-scale demands hit
Enterprises, organizations will follow the lead of the web's
giants
who are building lower-cost solutions from commodity components without
compromising either reliability or performance. Even traditional
vendors
see the changing landscape, and are speaking about agnostic solutions.
- Capacity to Become
an IT "Enabler" Rather than a "Constraint"
Storage-as-a-service
and big data analytics will enable IT to contend with the tsunami of data.
Rather than constrain IT development, application deployment, or responsiveness
(as often happens today), the growth of capacity will drive more extensive database
testing, new applications, greater value from data and, ultimately, increased
IT responsiveness. This will result in a
stronger alignment of IT infrastructures with corporate goals.
- Storage Tiering in
the Cloud (not just to the cloud)
In reality, data
tiering has been difficult for many organizations to fully achieve, often due
to the lack of physical resources needed to accommodate each tier. With new
storage options and Enterprise-grade features in the cloud (such as SSD-powered
services and mission-critical HA capabilities) organizations will now be able
to move more applications to the cloud and take advantage of even greater cost
efficiencies, employing tiering techniques within the cloud itself.
Do you see these
trends emerging? Is your organization already taking advantage of these
changes? Let me know in the comments.
##
About the Author
Noam Shendar is VP of Business
Development at Zadara Storage, a provider of enterprise Storage as a Service
(STaaS) solutions.
He has over 15 years of experience with enterprise
technologies including at LSI Corporation, MIPS Technologies, entertainment
technology startup iBlast, and Intel.