Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2016. Read them in this 8th Annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Tony Savoy, Vice President, Managed Hosting and Cloud Services of Hostway Services, Inc.
6 Predictions for Cloud Industry Trends in 2016
As 2015
winds down, the cloud computing market continues to look up. Even in tightly
regulated industries, cloud
adoption is experiencing a steep rise, with one study reporting that its adoption
rate has increased 71 percent in the last 12 months. But where do we go
from here? Tony Savoy, Hostway's General Manager and Vice President of Managed
Hosting and Cloud Services, offered six suggestions for what we'll see in 2016:
Partnering with the Giants: Hosters and
Managed Service Providers (MSPs) will forgo making major investments in
building out their own public cloud offerings, instead looking to partner with "Frenemies"
like Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. In the coming year, there will be an
emergence of new offerings released using someone else's cloud platform.
Containers in Store: Major shifts will
be made in 2016 towards "containerized" services. While virtual machines will
still have their place in the cloud market for a number of years, cloud-enabled
containers will be introduced at an accelerated pace. Providers like Digital
Ocean have built their entire business around containers; Azure will release
support for them in their vNext releases. This trend will pick up steam.
No Stop to Dev/Ops: The culture shift
of IT organizations to a DevOps-centric approach will move rapidly next year. As
these organizations try to become more nimble like many cloud-first development
shops, recognizing the great cloud technology at their disposal, they'll seek more
ways to scale and manage their workloads using these approaches. This shift
will also impact automation as businesses find ways to remove human error - and
on-call staff - from their equations. Modern companies are pushing for auto-remediation
of various infrastructure issues, as well as looking to advanced application
monitoring to trigger corrective measures when certain parameters violate
pre-defined thresholds.
SaaS Will Last: Applications are increasingly
moving to Software-as-a-Service models, even if they are open-source. 2016 will
see growth in SaaS-like offerings - ala WPEngine - and customers will want to
move to those platforms. The applications most likely to see significant
upticks from this include WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Magento Community and
Enterprise editions.
Stigma Subsiding: Enterprise IT
organizations are moving more workloads to the cloud as the stigma of lax
security and noisy neighbor concerns disappears. The maturity of cloud
technologies is being recognized, defined by improved auto-scaling,
auto-healing, networking, and software-defined security. As these customers seek
the cloud leader as a destination for their workloads, they are left with two main
choices: Azure or AWS.
Migration and Maintenance Support: Enterprise
IT organizations willing to move to the cloud will need help in two areas.
First, they will need help with migration and assessment for their transition. These
companies often need to migrate legacy software systems that may not be
well-suited for cloud; these situations may require some hand-holding. Secondly,
once these customers have migrated to the cloud, they will require 24/7
proactive support via highly skilled and certified service delivery teams to
keep their applications up and running.
The safest
prediction for 2016, of course, is that cloud adoption in general will continue
unabated. For businesses built around these technologies, it's primarily about
finding the best way to capitalize on the trend.
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About the Author
Tony Savoy is the Vice President of Managed Hosting and Cloud Services at Hostway
Services, Inc. He has over 15 years of experience in
Managed Hosting, IT Outsourcing, and Cloud Computing and joins Hostway from
VMware where he was the Sr. Director of the Strategic Program Management Office
and Compliance Programs for vCloud Air (formerly vCloud Hybrid Service). Prior
to VMware Tony worked for Verizon Terremark where he was
the Sr. Director of Cloud Products for the Enterprise Cloud, Enterprise Cloud
Express Edition, Enterprise Cloud Managed Edition, Enterprise Cloud Private
Edition, Enterprise Cloud Federal Edition, and CloudSwitch. Before Verizon's
acquisition of Terremark in 2011 Tony led the Product Management organization
responsible for managed hosting, managed security, colocation, managed network
services, managed storage & backup, and cloud computing. Tony holds a BS
degree in Electrical Engineering Technology from the University of North Texas.
He resides in the Dallas / Ft. Worth area with his family.
