Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2017. Read them in this 9th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Shehzad Merchant, CTO of Gigamon
Delivering on the Promise of Cloud
Cloud is promising to deliver greater operational
cost-savings and flexibility, which has companies anxious and ready to migrate
away from their legacy architectures. Whether deploying public, private or
hybrid cloud, enterprises are increasingly challenged with cybersecurity
concerns that have dominated the headlines this past year. I foresee 2017 as a
crucial year for cloud security as organizations adopt new strategies to
protect their data in motion. For a focused and strategic information security
approach, enterprises will need full visibility across the infrastructure to
"see" what they need to stop. Here are five trends to look out for as
we look toward the next year:
1. SaaS-ifying the cloud. Although it's
very familiar to some, the ongoing cloud conversation will become even more
prominent, structured and specific in 2017. We've already seen organizations
begin to differentiate Software-as-a Service (SaaS) from Infrastructure-as-a
Service (IaaS), so much so that I expect the SaaS space will soon be booming
with more providers offering a larger variety of applications. I think we'll
specifically see enterprises attempt to "SaaS-ify" their on-premise applications.
If they're unable to make the move to SaaS, enterprises will look to IaaS or
private cloud.
2. Seeing is believing with network
visibility. The lack of security tools for debugging, troubleshooting and
managing applications on-premise has hindered the move to public cloud and
IaaS. That is no longer true today given a new generation of visibility tools
that have enabled greater transparency into and security of data-in-motion.
Organizations are encouraged to migrate to IaaS and take advantage of the
elasticity, resources and manpower it has to offer.
3. Moving the "crown jewels". Enterprises
will move beyond using public cloud for just testing, development or burst
capacity purposes. They will leverage the elasticity and capacity benefits of
IaaS to now host their most prized possessions - the always-on,
mission-critical, tier-1 applications - and gain even more insight into traffic
flow to help perform content inspection.
4. Prioritizing security. Understanding
data flowing through network layers is crucial to security efforts, especially
when placing crown jewels into the cloud. More comprehensive security will be
required to help pinpoint any potential attempts of exposing sensitive data
given attackers' incessant efforts to gain lucrative data. As the number of
breaches rise, enterprises will become subject to more persistent and targeted
attacks. As a result, organizations will migrate their security platform and
tools in parallel with their critical applications in 2017.
5. Featuring top players, Amazon and Azure.
As the year unfolds, I see the market turning into an oligopoly with Amazon and
Azure, which will lead in the IaaS space. Following at their heels, we can
expect to see IBM and Google as secondary IaaS solution providers and Oracle
setting itself as an emerging Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) player. The rest of
the players will soon fade away...
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About the Author
Shehzad Merchant serves as Gigamon's Chief Technology
Officer bringing over 20 years of experience in the high-tech industry. Prior to
joining Gigamon, Merchant served as the CTO at Extreme Networks, and is the
author of several networking and communications patents. He is a frequent
speaker at various industry events including Interop and Open Networking
Summit, and has been engaged with many standards bodies including the IEEE,
IETF and ONF. Prior to Extreme Networks, he was the co-founder and VP of
Products at Polytime Systems, following on from various senior architectural
and research roles at Allied Telesyn, Nevis Networks and SRI. He holds a
Master's Degree in Computer Engineering from USC and an
Electronic Engineering degree from the University of Mumbai.
