
Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2018. Read them in this 10th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Mario Blandini, VP Marketing, SwiftStack
Cloud Storage in 2018 - Predictions for a New Era in the Information Age
If anyone needs a reminder as to disruption in how vendors
serve IT organizations, look no further than these two statements of fact:
1. The operating profit from Amazon's cloud
computing unit more than made up for the operating loss of its other business
units, ensuring the company remained in the black and helping to keep its stock
prices high
2. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is, at the present time,
the richest man in the world thanks in large part to the company's aforementioned
high stock price
So, basically, the cloud keeps Amazon's stock sky high and Bezos'
fortunes on Cloud 9.
Anyone that's been paying attention the past several years has
seen the importance of the cloud in the IT industry and its impact on vendors
that serve IT. Many vendors have been trying their best to shift their solutions
focus from on-premises to cloud-native with varied success. 2018 will be a year
when vendors must go beyond simply leveraging "the cloud" to complement their
legacy on-premises infrastructure, and instead prove that "cloud-first"
strategies are genuinely architected such that anything on-premises instead
serves to complement cloud infrastructure.
No Longer "The" Cloud
Bezos would certainly like you to believe that the Amazon Web
Services is the only cloud option in existence, but other tech behemoths
including Google and Microsoft have made it clear that Amazon is not the only
game in town. What is interesting is how
many entities still look at cloud storage as moving data to "the" cloud, as
though it is a single repository. "The"
cloud is not an all-encompassing platform, it is an architecture. "The" cloud isn't delivered with a single set
of protocols or de facto management tools.
Heck, even within Amazon, there are different tiers of cloud storage
options available.
What we will see in 2018 is an increasing want and need
among IT organizations for something that moves beyond a single cloud provider to
a multi-cloud experience that determines where data and workloads reside based
on their unique needs and business value.
All data is not created equal, which means that not every cloud is a
perfect fit for it. With a multi-cloud
approach, workloads can be moved to the most-appropriate cloud based on
attributes, location and needs of the application. Like server virtualization
just after the turn of the century, the promise of cost reduction and agility
is driving cloud architectures. IT needs solutions controlled by policies that
among other things can take advantage of the lowest-cost pricing of individual
cloud providers by automatically storing data to the cloud with the best
pricing.
Multi-Cloud Means
Hybrid Cloud
While the cloud promises freedom to retain data anywhere,
the reality is that an enterprise will still prefer to maintain a datacenter
even while leveraging the benefits cloud storage has to offer. Cloud providers
like Amazon and Google have far more resources than any IT security department does,
but companies are going to keep truly business-sensitive data in-house
maintained by internal IT departments for the foreseeable future. So, while all of an organization's data could
be kept in the cloud, it makes the most sense to leverage multiple cloud
vendors for their benefits of analytics, collaboration and economics while
keeping some amount of data on-premises. Hybrid cloud is the new definition of
"datacenter".
How applications are served should be decided based on proprietary
software-defined data storage. When architected properly, a single namespace serving
cloud-native data provides accessibility, in-depth insights from analytics, and
a practical means for companies to make the best decisions based on their data.
Conclusion
With consumers keeping photos and documents and songs in
"the cloud," this approach to data storage has grown beyond consumer and can be
available to IT organizations. Enterprises are looking to see how they can
leverage the cloud, whether for its accessible-anywhere attributes or for the
economic benefits of storing business data offsite without the requisite
capital expenditure costs.
While Bezos has about 90 billion reasons for you
to believe that a single cloud is all you need, where the future of cloud
storage now lies in utilizing multiple clouds to empower freedom to move
workloads between clouds with universal access to data across on-premises and
public infrastructure.
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About the Author
Mario is Chief Evangelist at SwiftStack, Inc. Passionate about
disruption, he has previously lead marketing teams for Storage
technology companies including Brocade, Drobo, and HGST. Mario has also
deployed infrastructure in technical roles at Rhapsody Networks (now
Brocade), Sanrise (now EMC), Adaptec, and the United States Marine
Corps.