Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2015. Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed article by Fredrik Schmidt, VP of Cloud and Innovation at Accelerite
Artificial Federation Products Will Enable Multi-Cloud Orchestration
2015 will be the year of Cloud Federation (Hybridity) - by
artificial means. Enterprises will become increasingly frustrated with vendor
lock-in and wary of public cloud security risks, and look for solutions that
enable them to leverage an orchestration of private, public, and hybrid clouds
- customized to their needs and optimized for their unique set of applications.
They will, in effect, force the issue of "Can't we all just get along?" The
reality is, we should.
I see the following four themes gaining more traction in the
new year:
Multi-Cloud Orchestration
One cloud won't cut it, and businesses already know it. They'll
look for options that make using a mix of clouds seamless - this app in AWS,
this one in Google, this one in a private cloud...and then the one in AWS
migrating to private, and the one in private migrating to Google...all based on
the current health of the individual clouds, and the current needs of the
business. Enterprises will demand technology that enables an optimized cloud
orchestration.
Artificial Federation
Tools that replicate, convert, migrate, and recover data and
applications across both physical and virtual environments regardless of
operating system, hypervisor, or cloud will be crucial and nearly necessary for enterprises to use cloud
computing efficiently. They'll need the flexibility and control for which a
federated environment allows, and seek out tools that can quickly create that
federation artificially.
Containers
Enterprises large and small will also decide that this is the
year to take that awkward-looking application and give it a trim. Cut a little
here, change a bit there, and eventually it will fit inside a container, to be
shipped on Panamax into their own "Maersk" data center. Containers are the
closest we might get to "true virtualization," but the real crux is building
distributed and parallel applications at heart. How they run is one step closer
to a simplistic reality in an ocean of options. So Docker, Rocket your way into
a new dimension and set sail with even more analogistic language terms and
confusion.
Security
If 2014 was the year that antivirus vendors finally admitted to
a fact that was known long before (that they don't work anymore), 2015 might be
the year we finally get the point across that security is absolutely broken and
we are all getting "owned" as a cracker might call it. With concentration being
the name of the game around clouds, what happened to security, risk, and data
issues? I would venture to say if nation states can get broken into it is very
likely most clouds are already there as well.
Once, someone told me there are only two types of companies:
those that know they have been breached and those that don't know it yet. The
cloud might be a new promise land for some things, but it sure brings a whole
lot of old problems with it. Expecting some major clouds to finally realize or
admit they got owned in the coming year might be a bit of a stretch, though -
historically, nobody ever admits to it happening to them.
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About the Author
Fredrik Schmidt serves as VP of Cloud and Innovation at Accelerite,
where he specializes in cloud recovery as a service (RaaS), high-performance
computing, virtualization, security, storage management, business continuity
management, datacenter transformation practices, and the cloud. In prior roles,
Fredrik served as Technical Director at Symantec, Senior IT/IS Director at
Thompson Multimedia, and CIO and Co-Founder of Kryptonite Security. Throughout
his career, Fredrik has contributed to developing professional services,
product, and R&D around Utility Computing, SOA, cloud, and service
delivery, and he has also worked extensively in the security field.