Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2018. Read them in this 10th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Jerry Melnick, President and CEO, SIOS Technology Corp.
5 Ways the Shift to the Cloud Will Impact IT in 2018
The last year has been a transformative one for enterprise IT teams. For many, the old on-premises data centers have been replaced by combinations of physical, virtual, cloud and hybrid cloud environments. We saw a growing number of companies move business-critical applications and databases, such as SQL Server, SAP and Oracle, into public cloud and hybrid cloud environments. According to a recent report by Synergy Research, the four biggest cloud providers - Alphabet, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft - each saw growth in their cloud computing businesses, driving a 40% year-over-year (YoY) increase in cloud infrastructure service revenue.
As with any major change, the shift to the cloud for business critical applications will affect IT teams in several ways in the coming year. Here are five of those potential outcomes and how IT should prepare in 2018.
1. Running Business-Critical Apps in the Cloud Becomes the Norm
Despite the proven benefits of cloud computing, IT teams have kept business critical applications and databases within their own on-premises data centers where they have control over every aspect of the environment. However, cloud providers and their partners continue to refine their offerings to make migration, deployment, high availability and management easier and more efficient. For example, companies can use an AWS Quick Start template to quickly and easily deploy SQL Server in a high availability Windows cluster in the cloud. These templates address two key barriers to moving important applications to the cloud by simplifying the complexity of deployment and providing easy, effective high availability protection.
2. DBAs Take on New Responsibilities
One of the most significant changes we will see in 2018 will be toward a more collaborative relationship between IT infrastructure managers and database administrators (DBAs). As more applications are run in the cloud, senior DBA managers will be able to take more of a central role in troubleshooting problems and improving efficiency. DBAs will be looking beyond just the application and database to find and fix issues. Both IT and application teams will need tools that look deeply into the cloud infrastructure to identify causes of performance and availability issues and provide accurate recommendations for addressing them.
3. Greater Emphasis on Efficiency
Moving applications to the cloud changes the economics of the data center. This is especially true in business-critical application environments with stringent service level agreements (SLAs) and recovery point / recovery time objectives (RTO/RPOs). For example, in an on-premises data center, IT may deliberately over provision capacity and CPU hardware to ensure the application performance is maintained, unexpected capacity growth is accommodated and failovers happen without incident. In the consumption-based pricing models used in public clouds, over provisioning can be much costlier than in on-premises environments. However, reducing this over provisioning may put critical database at risk for downtime or data loss. As a result, the second half of 2018 will see IT and application teams putting greater emphasis on using sophisticated analytics and management tools that enable them to accurately right-size their environments without jeopardizing their SLAs and RTO/ROPs or their budget.
4. Increased Use of Machine-Learning Based Tools
IT managers cannot continue to oversee the increasingly complex and data-intensive environments of today's IT infrastructure manually. New machine-learning-based tools are providing high-efficiency, automated solutions to help them find root causes of performance and availability issues and eliminate wasted resources. Sophisticated machine learning solutions learn the patterns of behavior between related components in the cloud infrastructure over time. They correlate application performance issues and failovers to changes in the infrastructure and apply causality algorithms to determine the cause with remarkable accuracy and precision. These tools also provide important information for helping IT teams right-size their virtual and cloud environments to meet their RTO/RPOs and SLAs without over spending.
5. Proactive Management of IT Infrastructure
In today's fast-changing, dynamic virtual environments, IT managers can no longer afford to be reactive or to use trial-and-error to address issues. As 2018 progresses, IT management will be able to take full advantage of the holistic, predictive analytics that new machine-learning based tools enable. These tools can predict and even recommend steps to avoid a variety of issues that can take IT application owners by surprise with costly results. For example, IT can use these tools to eliminate application performance issues, threats to failovers and unexpected capacity usage.
Next year will be pivotal as the enterprises IT teams continue to combine physical, virtual, and cloud-based infrastructures.
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About the Author
Jerry Melnick, President and Chief Executive Officer, SIOS
Jerry is responsible for directing the overall corporate strategy for SIOS Technology Corp. and leading the company's ongoing growth and expansion. He has more than 25 years of experience in the enterprise and high availability software markets. Before joining SIOS, he was CTO at Marathon Technologies where he led business and product strategy for the company's fault tolerant solutions. His experience also includes executive positions at PPGx, Inc. and Belmont Research, where he was responsible for building a leading-edge software product and consulting business focused on supplying data warehouse and analytical tools.