Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2017. Read them in this 9th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Lynn LeBlanc, CEO and founder of HotLink
4 Public cloud predictions corporate IT will fulfill in 2017
At this time last year, corporate IT teams were looking at
the bell-shaped adoption curve for public cloud initiatives from a very
different vantage point than they are today. In the past 12 months, early
adopters have done what they do best: prove the value proposition of a wide
range of cloud use cases in terms of speed, agility and cost effectiveness.
Their trailblazing clears the way for enterprises to embrace the public cloud
in 2017, and we can expect corporate IT in all industries to adopt the cloud for
more critical production workloads this year. It's really a very exciting time
for IT as mainstream users benefit from public cloud technologies and services.
This will play out in four key areas:
1. IT teams will move increasingly valuable
applications to the public cloud.
The early adopters had to take
several key steps in their ascent toward public cloud adoption. They moved
their dev/test workloads to the cloud, and they migrated non-production
applications and data backup. By the time they leveraged Amazon Web Services
(AWS) for disaster recovery and business continuity, the first-movers were
showing everyone else that capabilities that had once been completely
unaffordable were now within reach. Today, no one can deny that these
accomplishments have cleared the path for the systematic movement of production
operations to the cloud.
2. Corporate IT will emphasize hybrid management.
As these trends continue and more mid-market and enterprise
businesses become home to hybrid IT infrastructure, they'll have to find
efficient ways to manage blended computing models. Effective hybrid management
constructs are essential for providing predictable, reliable and secure
computing operations. For this reason, we'll see corporate IT aggressively
seeking out methods to extend their on-premise management environments to the
public cloud. Hybrid management, orchestration, automation, security and analytics
will be the key to keeping operational complexity in check.
3. Enterprises will hold the line against
vendor lock-in.
The public clouds are pushing the same lures that create vendor
lock-in as many CIOs have seen before, and they won't allow it to happen again.
It might be easier to deploy an environment built for a single platform, whether
on-premise or in the cloud, but corporate IT knows painfully well that this simplicity
comes with the price of vendor handcuffs. Instead, enterprises will architect
workload portability and management extensibility for the benefit of their
businesses - not for the benefit of vendors.
4. Business resiliency will be the public
cloud killer app of the year.
It used to be that disaster recovery and business continuity
were in reach only for the most fiscally flush companies and the most critical
workloads. It was just too costly to ensure resiliency for the whole business.
No more. The public cloud has completely changed the value proposition for
DR/BC, and it will become the No. 1 strategic cloud opportunity for corporate
IT this year. Comprehensive business resiliency is now available, accessible
and affordable for the mainstream.
Corporate IT's view of the public cloud adoption curve at
the start of 2016 was mostly uphill. This year, things are looking very
different. Data centers of every size are in a position to ascend in 2017 and
reap the economic benefits of the public cloud. As importantly, they'll be able
to do so without making concessions on complexity, extensibility or lock-in.
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About the Author
Lynn LeBlanc, CEO and founder of HotLink
Corporation, has more than 25
years of enterprise software and technology experience at both Fortune 500 companies
and Silicon Valley startups. Prior to founding HotLink, Lynn was founder and
CEO of FastScale Technology, an enterprise software company acquired by VMware,
Inc.