Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2016. Read them in this 8th Annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Joe Kinsella, Founder and CTO of CloudHealth Technologies
Top Cloud Predictions for the Year Ahead
As we close out 2015 and look forward to 2016, there is A
LOT to reflect on and forecast. Below you will find my top predictions for the
year ahead.
RIP Private Cloud
The biggest missed story of 2015 has been the profound
failure of the private cloud. Just a few years ago, the private cloud was IT's
solution to remaining relevant to their business partners. I remember attending
OpenStack Boston 2011 at the height of the private cloud movement, where
everyone seemed convinced of the inevitability of the self-managed private
cloud. But after years of incredible innovation in the public cloud and
disarray in private cloud, 2016 will be the year that the private cloud as a
primary strategy will finally go to its grave. I expect some big shake ups in
the private cloud, especially in the OpenStack community. Unless the private
cloud substantially changes its pace of innovation, it will become a speed bump
for enterprises on their way into the public cloud.
Google Still Doesn't Figure It Out
If there was ever a company that should own the public
cloud, it would be Google. They were building cutting-edge cloud infrastructure
while the rest of us were still talking about our type 1 hypervisors. They even
introduced the term "cloud computing" into our lexicon. I don't know about you,
but with the exception of a handful of mobile companies that built their
businesses on AppEngine, I rarely run into a Google cloud customer. While I
believe Google has the vision, financial resources, and technical capacity to
be a top cloud provider, I predict they will continue to lose more ground in
2016. To take liberty with the famous Wayne Gretzky quote, in the process to
skating to where Google thinks the puck will be, companies like Amazon and
Microsoft are busy putting the puck in the net.
Hybrid Cloud Hype Unleashed
Recent industry news would make it hard not to predict 2016
to be the year of the hybrid cloud. But before doing this, let's remind
ourselves of the last year of the hybrid cloud: 2012. Back then industry
experts were predicting the hybrid cloud to be the future of enterprise cloud
computing, with the private cloud as the foundation and the public cloud used
for bursting and new / unproven workloads. So with this historical reminder, I
predict 2016 to be the year of the hybrid cloud hype, where products rebrand
themselves as powering and/or enabling the hybrid cloud, and container hype
reaches new heights. Expect legacy data center and virtualization products to
attempt to breath new life into their aging product lines with the term "hybrid
cloud", and existing public cloud vendors to reach into the data center to get
a little of the hybrid shine. Ultimately, hybrid cloud is essentially the toll
booth on the way to the public cloud.
End of Shadow IT
Public cloud adoption in the enterprise was fueled, to a
large extent, by shadow IT - effectively "rogue" lines of business that worked
around their slow-moving IT departments. With shadow IT, enterprises indirectly
embraced an incredible amount of innovation in SaaS, cloud computing, mobile,
and open source. This innovation has come at a risk to the business, since it
typically worked around the IT business policies put in place to mitigate
risks. I predict 2016 to be the end of shadow IT. Two things have changed: 1)
IT has embraced and provided leadership in many of the disruptive changes they
ignored over the last several years, and 2) enterprises desperately need a lean
and agile IT again to help propel their businesses through the current state of
technology turmoil. The resurgence of enterprise IT will drive changes in
product functionality and how vendors market, sell, price and deliver their
services.
Cloud Automation Goes Mainstream
We saw the emergence of business-level automation of the
cloud with products from companies like VMTurbo and CloudHealth Technologies.
This emerging market is being driven by what I call the "Complexity Gap", where
the complexity of the building and managing cloud infrastructure is outpacing
the ability of management software / services to contain this complexity. The
future of the cloud will not be DevOps engineers writing low-level scripts to
automate parts of our infrastructure. Instead it will be business-level
automation, with enterprises inputting the policies by which they want their
business systems managed and smart software executing these policies in support
of the business. I predict 2016 to be the year business-level automation of the
cloud goes mainstream.
Telecom Makes Big Moves in the Cloud
I think telecom companies will finally make big moves in the
cloud. Ahhh, just kidding. Remember everyone predicting telecom providers would
be the real winners in the cloud? Glad we can finally put this one to bed.
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About the Author
Joe Kinsella is CTO and Founder of CloudHealth
Technologies, one of the fastest growing companies in the emerging Cloud
Service Management field. Joe is focused on
helping organizations realize the full potential of the cloud, without having
to sacrifice cost, performance, availability, or service level. With 20+ years of experience delivering software for
companies of all sizes, Joe sees CloudHealth bringing the cloud to the
enterprise by enabling the next generation of IT service management for the
cloud.
