Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019. Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Joe Kinsella, Founder and CTO, CloudHealth by VMware
Cloud Keeps Rolling In - Cloud 3.0 Is Here
Let me
take you back. The year was 2017 and I had just published a predictions
article to the VMblog, touting the presence of ‘Cloud 2.0.' The
short of it was platform services and serverless applications leveraging
heterogeneous cloud services. Fourteen months removed from that post, where are
we now? Cloud 2.0 has passed and Cloud 3.0 is the new era.
Cloud
3.0 is really about the proliferation and continued adoption across industries.
On top of that, the creation of solutions and tools that help businesses
achieve success in the cloud will continue to grow to meet increased demand.
How many times have you read that "this is the year of cloud?" Well, I won't
bore you with that line, but cloud is now synonymous with everything successful
in business.
There
are two major trends that will emerge in this next era of cloud:
Multicloud will dominate: 2019 will be about multicloud success. As
organizations deploy diverse clouds and operations within a single heterogeneous infrastructure, they will be
able to meet their different services and needs. As a strategy, multicloud will
be the choice for organizations who want to choose specific solutions for
business requirements, as challenges arise and the demand for digital
transformation becomes an integral part of future success.
Dependence on a single cloud provider is not the way forward. Leaders will
opt for multi-cloud strategies, allowing them to mitigate the risk of a single
point of failure, reducing impact and financial risk across the entire
enterprise. In a time when security threats are at their greatest, leveraging
two or more service providers will greatly decrease the risk of disaster during
downtime.
Public & Private Cloud will
Merge: As the cloud
industry has developed, there is clear movement towards a combined or hybrid
provision that blends the accessibility and cost benefits of the public cloud,
with the accountability and security of the private cloud. However, this
combination and balance of services will of course vary by sector, the nature
of the work, the maturity of the organization and the size of the business. For
example, highly regulated industries like healthcare and financial services are
still major tenants in the private cloud space.
We can expect to see a clear turning point for organizations to migrate
critical workloads to the public cloud in order to get ahead in digital
transformation. The benefits of public cloud are many - from faster access to
emerging technologies, unlimited scalability and capacity when you need it
most. Hybrid provisioning offers a best of breed solution for all critical
capabilities in the cloud, while adding a layer of security by keeping some
things in private cloud platforms.
Cloud is transformational for business success and is at
the heart of all the technologies we love to talk about, including AI, machine
learning, digital transformation and an always on workforce. With this new era
of cloud will come immense innovation, competition and uncharted challenges to
conquer as we all continue toward a more digital future.
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About the Author
Joe has 20+ years of experience delivering
commercial software for both startups and large enterprises. He was previously
VP of Engineering at the Amazon-backed cloud archiving company Sonian, where he
developed and managed large scale cloud infrastructure spanning multiple public
clouds. He was also a managing director at Dell, where he led global engineering
teams delivering multiple SaaS products. Joe was also Vice President of
Engineering at SilverBack Technologies, which was acquired by Dell in 2007,
where he helped pioneer remote management software.
He is an advisor to the University
of Massachusetts Boston Entrepreneur Center, mentors for a high school FIRST
robotics team (FRC 4761), and blogs at High Tech in the Hub. He is also a member of the Forbes Technology
Council and a 2017 Boston CIO of the Year award winner. CloudHealth Technologies was acquired by VMware
in 2018 and is now CloudHealth by VMware.