Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2018.  Read them in this 10th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Aron Brand, CTO, CTERA Networks

The rise of the multi-cloud and the stateless enterprise

In the enterprise world, the gradual cloud adoption seen in 2016, grew into an avalanche of cloud-first strategies in 2017. As critical business functions are rapidly migrated to the cloud, as we approach 2018, we see an increasing trend towards adoption of hybrid and multi-cloud technologies, where multiple cloud providers as well as private data centers are being meshed together. This new approach allows for the resolution of security and regulatory barriers and also reduces dependence on any single cloud vendor. 

With more and more data stored in the cloud, endpoint devices become only extensions thereof.  Companies are shifting towards the "stateless enterprise" architecture -  eliminating all the "state" from those endpoint devices. By the moving the primary home of the data from the endpoint devices to a cloud, endpoint devices - whether laptops, desktops, file servers, or whatever - become merely a local cache of that cloud based "golden copy". This shift towards a stateless architecture has a wonderful side effect - an elimination of the "dark data" which was previously stored in employee's laptops or desktops. Suddenly, all of this "dark" data is right at your fingertips - stored in the cloud- as a searchable, analyzable and sharable repository.  

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About the Author

Aron Brand, CTO, CTERA Networks 

Aron brings more than 18 years of experience in designing and implementing distributed software systems to CTERA. He was previously Chief Architect at SofaWare Technologies, a Check Point company. Aron holds a BSc degree in Management and Computer Science from Tel Aviv University.