Although we have been talking about the future of cloud for what seems like many years, there is still a huge debate around what's to come in the 2018. The choice to embrace or not embrace the cloud provides a plethora of new and different challenges and factors IT infrastructures face. Industry experts take a look at both pros and cons of the cloud, and whether or not they think it's here to stay or is on its way out.

"More companies are already looking to the cloud as the preferred architecture for their data environment, and 2018 will be a tipping point for adoption. Cloud-first will likely become the norm and even large enterprises will fully embrace this stance. The biggest challenge for companies making this transition will be how to embrace the period during which they have data both on-premises and in the cloud. We're already working with companies to develop and operate automated and efficient hybrid data environments and expect to see this number increase dramatically in the next year," - Neil Barton, CTO at WhereScape

"From a storage perspective, I think what will surprise many is that in 2018 we will see the majority of organizations move away from convergence and instead focus on working with specialist vendors to get the expertise they need. The cloud will be a big part of this, especially as we're going to see a major shift in public cloud adoption. I believe public cloud implementation has reached a peak, and we will even see a retreat from the public cloud due to hidden costs coming to light and the availability, management and security concerns."  - Gary Watson, Founder and CTO of Nexsan

"Throughout 2017 we have seen many organizations focus on implementing a 100% cloud focused model and there has been a push for complete adoption of the cloud. There has been a debate around on-premises and cloud, especially when it comes to security, performance and availability, with arguments both for and against. But the reality is that the pendulum stops somewhere in the middle. In 2018 and beyond, the future is all about simplifying hybrid IT. The reality is it's not on-premises versus the cloud. It's on-premises and the cloud. Using hyperconverged solutions to support remote and branch locations and making the edge more intelligent, in conjunction with a hybrid cloud model, organizations will be able to support highly changing application environments" - Jason Collier, co-founder at Scale Computing

"Cloud is here and it's here to stay; that's not news at this point. But the dramatic shift cloud is bringing to IT infrastructures brings entirely new platforms and challenges to the systems development life cycle (SDLC). I predict in 2018, IT and dev teams will have to navigate the best way to use orchestration and data mobility. This will be important in bringing development, test or QA workloads to a MSP or public cloud platform. Having orchestration and data mobility capabilities that can go back-and-forth from MSP, public and on-premises clouds will enable companies to change their costs structure. Some applications may run most efficiently on AWS, for example, while others are better suited for Azure. The hard part is that it's often difficult to know in advance.  Combine this with the fact that companies are demanding a multi-cloud strategy, and don't want to be on just one platform or cloud, more organizations in 2018 will adopt solutions that allow for easy and affordable cloud platform testing. Having the ability to ‘try out' different applications on different platforms, quickly and without a heavy cost burden, will ultimately allow organizations to end up with a customized, multi-cloud approach that optimizes performance in ways not possible before the cloud boom." - Rob Strechay, SVP Product, Zerto

"This will be the year of making hybrid cloud a reality. In 2017, companies dipped their toes into a combination of managed service providers (MSP), public cloud and on-premises infrastructure. In 2018, organizations will look to leverage hybrid clouds for orchestration and data mobility to establish edge data centers that take advantage of MSPs with large bandwidth into public clouds, ultimately bringing mission critical data workloads closer to front-end applications that live in the public cloud. Companies will also leverage these capabilities to bring test or QA workloads to burst in a MSP or public cloud. Having the ability to move data back and forth from MSPs, public clouds and on-premises infrastructure will also enable companies to take advantage of the costs structure that hybrid cloud provides." - Rob Strechay, SVP Product, Zerto

"2018 will be the year that DR moves from being a secondary issue to a primary focus. The last 12 months have seen mother nature throw numerous natural disasters at us, which has magnified the need for a formal DR strategy. The challenge is that organizations are struggling to find DR solutions that work simply at scale. It's become somewhat of the white whale to achieve, but there are platforms that are designed to scale and protect workloads wherever they are - on-premises or in the public cloud." - Chris Colotti, Field CTO at Tintri

With more and more companies implementing cloud-focused models, business leaders will have lots of decisions to face come the new year. The progress that has been made with cloud technology provides more options, but can also make the decision of how to implement a cloud strategy harder. Companies should look for trusted advisors to partner with and software to implement in 2018 to ensure they are taking full advantage of everything the cloud has to offer.