Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2016.  Read them in this 8th Annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Issy Ben-Shaul, co-founder and CEO, Velostrata

Intelligent Hybrid Cloud Technologies Will Enable Enterprises to Finally Adopt Public Clouds for Production Workloads

The benefits of utility-based cloud computing have been well established and realized by a large and growing number of small and medium businesses: It provides the agility that customers need in terms of infrastructure to start, grow rapidly and accelerate their time to market; and it provides the cost efficiency associated with pay-as-you-go infrastructure, especially for variable, part-time or less-predictable workloads.

However, adoption among enterprises, especially for production workloads, has been very slow and is still at single digit penetration as of end of 2015, due to the following key barriers:

1. Risk - Concerns about permanently migrating data assets to cloud are prevalent.
2. Time - Stateful workloads with large datasets take forever to migrate. For instance, moving a 20TB volume over 20Mbps link would take 100 days.
3. Complexity - Migrating existing workloads - images, storage, networking - is a daunting task.
4. Lock-in - Enterprises want the flexibility to choose where to run their workloads - on-prem, or any of the reliable public clouds. Furthermore, they would like to be able to make that choice dynamically, based on performance, cost or current load.

In 2016, we predict that there will be a rise in public cloud adoption by enterprises for production workloads. This rise will be driven by the availability of new intelligent hybrid cloud platforms and technologies that will gradually eliminate these barriers for some of the workloads. Specifically:

1. Risk concerns can be mitigated by leaving sensitive datasets on-prem while providing technologies to stream compute instances to the cloud in real time, and optimizing performance in accessing remote on-prem datasets.
2. Streaming workloads also imply dramatic reduction in time to on-board workloads, from days or weeks to minutes.
3. Key to reducing complexity is in providing the mechanisms to automatically adapt the images to fit the target clouds without requiring administrators or application owners to change anything in the images, applications, storage or network configuration. Furthermore, solutions should also strive to retain existing management practices and tools intact, only extending them with public cloud capabilities.
4. Last but not least, lock-in can be avoided by providing a cloud-agnostic solution that enables administrators to determine dynamically where and when to run workloads, across private or multiple public clouds.

To summarize, enterprises realize the benefits and are open to adopting gradually and partially the public cloud. But they need the vehicle that allows them to do so in a non-disruptive, fast, incremental and secure fashion. Such tools are finally becoming available in 2016.  

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Dr. Issy Ben-Shaul is the CEO and co-founder of Velostrata. He brings more than 15 years of experience in building successful startups and enterprise products, and over 25 years of deep expertise in distributed systems, networking and WAN optimization. Prior to founding Velostrata, Issy founded Wanova, which developed a novel distributed desktop virtualization product. Wanova was acquired by VMware, where he served as CTO in its end-user computing division. Prior to Wanova, Issy co-founded Actona, which developed WAN optimization technologies for network file and application services. Actona was acquired by Cisco, where Issy served as CTO in the App Delivery business unit. Before Actona, Issy was an assistant professor in the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology and published numerous papers. Issy holds 14 U.S. Patents and has a doctorate and master's degree in computer science from Columbia University and a bachelor's degree in computer science and mathematics from Tel Aviv University.