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

Contributed by Craig Lee, chief systems architect, Blue Medora

2018 - The Year of the Hybrid Cloud. What you should know.

It's here and it's here to stay. So if you've resisted embracing devops under the cover of legacy complexity and data center dependencies, it's time to let it go. 2018 is the year of the hybrid cloud - so here's what you need to know.

Hybrid Cloud is Actually Happening in 2018

In August I gave a presentation at VMWorld on the topic of hybrid cloud and how it's set to impact organizations. But when I polled the audience, few were implementing hybrid cloud solutions, yet, though a vast majority had it on their 2018 roadmap.

I consider the day VMware Cloud on AWS hit initial availability this fall to be the tipping point. With that news, most organizations now have a clear roadmap to the cloud without making significant changes to their existing workflows and toolsets overnight.

The launch of VMware on AWS will also mean 2018 brings a cool-front into the currently red-hot Microsoft Azure adoption rates. Azure adoption certainly benefited from the fact that large enterprises could get to cloud using the Windows and SQL server investments they know like the back of their hand. IDC estimates that 60% of large enterprises run VMs, so there stands a well-worn path of familiarity for the majority.

But VMware on AWS ups the ante when it comes to managing the hybrid environment without suffering tool sprawl. We learned many of these lessons the hard way through the virtualization push. The challenges are similar moving to public cloud and no one knows that better than VMware.

"Go broad" is the key theme in monitoring and capacity planning - create the single broadest view of all environments, across both public and private cloud. But the risk is that the more broadly you go, you sacrifice depth along the way. Our own vRealize Operations keeps that balance in mind, and provides integrations-as-a-service to extend your tooling to match the most heterogenous environment.

Shadow IT Comes Out of the Dark

This is also good news for IT departments. In the last few years, we've witnessed the rise of "shadow IT" - the decoupling of business needs and IT responsiveness --fueled by the increasing adoption of SaaS-based solutions (Gartner estimates 87% of organizations are using SaaS) in particular. Shadow IT has grown because IT became seen as the gatekeeper, slow or unable to support business initiatives. Business units began taking the lead in buying the solutions they needed - often armed just with a credit card - no longer encumbered by the technical domain of IT.

This will change in 2018 as more tools with cross functional appeal become available. Many of the major players are innovating with DevOps, Site Reliability engineers, IT Operations engineer, Full-Stack Developers and DBAs in mind. Many of these team members are now provisioning resources and demanding a common dialog around performance and availability.

I saw this firsthand at VMWorld too, as I participated in demos around VMWare's Developer Ready Infrastructure. It's a new initiative to bring traditional infrastructure specialists, once siloed around operating systems, storage, servers and networks, closer together with developers. It's designed to allow both roles to shift to broader expertise as they look to ramp adoption of DevOps methodologies for faster development.

Look for 2018 to also bring more such innovation. In my field, we're looking to new ways to bring performance monitoring to the masses--so that DevOps, DBAs, BI teams can speak the same language when it comes to performance tuning, troubleshooting and capacity planning. Bringing these various teams together from a technology perspective at enterprise-grade might mean we see a few more exciting partnerships like the Pivotal-VMware-Google PKS offering, in 2018.

So get ready for some deep changes in how IT gets back in the game and hybrid cloud becomes a reality, whether you like it or not. Resistance is futile!

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About the Author

Craig Lee is an experienced IT professional with years of datacenter and systems management experience. As Chief System Architect at Blue Medora Inc. his duties include, Enterprise IT Analysis, Business Intelligence and Project Research and planning.

Career Highlights Include: Leading SME and QA teams on over 50 Enterprise Monitoring Product Releases. Leading technical support organization that services customers worldwide. Leading design and build of an infrastructure to support a wide variety of enterprise line-of-business applications.