Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2017.  Read them in this 9th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Amir Sharif, Co-Founder & VP of Business, Aporeto

Protecting Our Data, Our Network, and Our Country in 2017

As the world continues its march towards containerizing applications, dramatically increasing network endpoints and topology change rates,  calls for simplifying networking technologies will grow louder.  Pressure will mount of traditional networking OEMs to drop costs and offer product lines where a streamlined set of features are offered reliably at near commodity prices.  Lower-end networking vendors will increase their market share as a group, and there will be a revival of sorts for software vendors that offer networking solutions for white box switches and routers.

Because of increasing flash chip capacities, faster network connections, and rapidly dropping prices, the shakeout in the storage industry will continue.  More firms will follow Violin Memory's path to bankruptcy; most of the remaining zombies will be consolidated into the corpus of a handful of healthier companies, and those zombies will be picked up for a song compared to the valuation that they received in their last round of financing.  In the meantime, AWS will announce another monster set of statistics, all indicating just how rapidly their various storage tiers are growing.

To automate InfoSec processes, we will see a new class of security monitoring and analytics instrumentation become part of the DevOps infrastructure.   The best-of-breed of these solutions will be invisible to the developers, leaving them free to develop with their preferred frameworks and languages.  The clunkier versions of this type of instrumentation will force development process changes and limit the developers to a select number of frameworks and a handful of languages.

The public will fully wake up to the concept of cyberspace warfare.  In 2016, the layman appreciated the fact that dominance on the ground, at the seas, and in the air was essential to the nation's security and economic infrastructure.  The average citizen also understands that control of outer space is a fundamental pillar to protecting the country.  However, 2017 will mark the year where the public will demand protection of all of the infrastructure: not only do we need to protect shipping routes that transmit atoms, we also need to secure communication channels that transfer bits.  

In 2017, Trump will formally unfriend Putin on Facebook in an "unpresidented" move, but will later claim massive electronic fraud perpetrated by the "failing" Silicon Valley" and then ask his son-in-law to make Facebook great again.  Everything will play in real time on Twitter.

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Amir Sharif has 20 years of experience building data center products integrating OS, virtualization, networking, storage, low-latency I/O, and orchestration. He drove market of adoption of Linux containers (OVZ) at Parallels and hypervisors (ESXi) at VMware, where he was the core platform product manager and lead the convergence efforts between ESX and ESXi. Amir holds patents in RFID and distributed storage and received his MBA from UC Berkeley, where he was a Gloria Appel Entrepreneurial Fellow, a Hitachi Mu Chip Fellow and Mayfield Fellow. He started his career as a mathematician and software engineer.