Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2018. Read them in this 10th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Brannan Matherson, Director of Product Management, CenturyLink Cloud Business
Security, Compliance and Governance Best Practices to Drive Cloud Growth in 2018
This year will undoubtedly be a year
of strong growth for the cloud market as more businesses transition to cloud
environments and managed services solutions. As more and more customers
interact with companies that have already made this transition - including
those that have successfully disrupted their respective industries, such as Amazon,
Netflix and Spotify - they will increasingly show a preference for these
companies and their products and services.
Because of this expectation,
enterprises that do not quickly transition to the cloud will lose business to
their competitors. Therefore, business leaders must review and understand their
spend for cloud, while working to develop innovative ways to deliver their
products and services to customers. In the process, they also must consider the
best architecture, design and migration scenarios for their transition. Without
additional investment and planning, enterprises will lose out to the disrupters
in their industries.
Similarly, I predict there will be an
uptick in adoption of cloud environments this year, particularly by small and
medium-size businesses. These organizations are unique due to limited bandwidth
and budget, thus they are often more willing and able to fully take advantage
of the elasticity of the public cloud for their existing workloads and
mission-critical applications.
As companies prepare to transition to
cloud environments, there will be additional opportunities for service
providers that are able to offer planning and assessment services for businesses
embarking on their digital transformations, especially for SMBs that do not
have such expertise and resources in-house. Furthermore, I expect to see an
increased focus on security and compliance best practices. As companies begin
their digital transformations and transition to cloud environments, they will want
to ensure that their critical company and customer data is well protected.
This year will also bring an increase
in companies leveraging big data and analytics. Enterprises of any size that do
not take full advantage of the available data about their current and
prospective customers will likely fall behind in their industry. Capturing and
interpreting such data can provide valuable insight for strategic
decision-making and capacity planning, as well as for developing innovative
products and services for customers.
To help guide our customers on
whatever networking and IT path they choose in the new year, CenturyLink plans
to double-down on our cloud and managed services. That's because we believe the
service providers who deliver the highest quality experience across the core
areas of business networking and communications services will be the big
winners in 2018 and beyond.
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About
the Author
In
his current role as director of product management, CenturyLink Cloud Business,
Brannan Matherson helps drive the growth of the CenturyLink Cloud platform
through the company's hybrid IT services portfolio. Prior to joining
CenturyLink, he served as head of product marketing at ElasticBox, which was
acquired by CenturyLink in June 2016. Before that, Matherson held several roles
at Microsoft.