Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2016. Read them in this 8th Annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Todd Scallan, VP of Product and Engineering, Axcient
Non-production Workloads Will Consolidate onto a Single SaaS Platform
As
a disaster-recovery company, Axcient works
with both virtualization and cloud platforms, ensuring that small and
medium sized business can stay up and running regardless of the situation (lost
laptop at an airport, business hit by a tornado). Over the past several years
we have seen the ups and downs in the market, especially within the world of
virtualization and cloud computing. When we look into the future, based on our
interaction with companies of all sizes across many industries, and seeing how
the market is trending, we predict that in 2016 non-production workloads
will consolidate onto a single SaaS platform.
This
consolidation has GOT to happen. "Why, you ask? Well, here are
a few reasons we have gathered to support our prediction:
- Non-production
data represents a significant cost to IT departments and infrastructure.
This is inevitable. As we continue to work in virtualized environments and
within the cloud, we continue to gather more and more data that puts
pressure on a company's infrastructure.
- Non-production
data necessitates secondary compute workloads for a wide variety of use
cases: N+1 resiliency, backup, direct restore, testing/development,
archiving, data warehousing, and business intelligence to name a few.
- Significant
IT costs are attributable to having to stand up multiple data centers for
compute redundancy. Significant IT costs are also attributable to many
copies of the same data resulting from having many different systems for
the various use cases cited above (N+1, etc.). These extra costs can be
especially crippling for small to medium sized businesses and MUST be
mitigated sooner rather than later.
- Cloud
computing makes it feasible to host non-production workloads on
demand, but will require an ability to replicate complex environments
(data, applications, systems, networks) into a consolidated, on-demand,
secondary infrastructure that takes advantage of the elastic computing and
cost economics of the cloud.
We
are saying this now - in 2016 there will be technologists, CIOs, and
COOs looking to SaaS vendors to ease the burdens
of IT departments and not create additional work. If our
prediction is correct, by this time next year, we will be well on our way to
consolidating non-production workloads onto a single SaaS
platform.
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About the Author
Todd
Scallan, VP of Product and Engineering, leads product
vision and engineering execution of the Axcient platform, and has more than 25
years of product management and engineering experience.
