Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2016. Read them in this 8th Annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by David Cope, EVP of Corporate Development and CMO, CliQr
Application Portability Takes Center Stage in 2016
In 2015, hybrid clouds hit the mainstream by fulfilling enterprises’ need to support a broad range data center, private and public cloud infrastructure environments for both new and existing applications. As companies come to realize that different application workloads are more appropriate on different environments based on a variety of technical, financial and regulatory factors, companies have immediately become enlightened to the fact that – for all of this to work and be a sustainable strategy – applications must be portable across these very diverse cloud environments. To this end, 2016 will be the year of application portability, in which companies can move applications to support their hybrid environments and workload needs and to avoid cloud-service-provider lock-in.
The process of managing enterprise applications – from development to testing and quality assurance to production deployment – can be difficult and often involves several teams. Considering that these applications are now managed across a federation of clouds, applications and users, IT professionals struggle to achieve common visibility and control while also enforcing corporate governance policies. In addition, there has been a lot of consolidation among cloud service providers, and each has proprietary technologies that IT professionals must accommodate. As a result, IT organizations need to develop a strategy to deploy and manage applications across these distinct environments that each have unique application programming interfaces, configurations and technology stacks.
Traditionally, moving applications to the cloud involved forcing applications to conform to the infrastructure and requiring bundles of custom scripts. In today’s hybrid world, this simply won’t scale. Instead, there needs to be a way to flip the conventional approach on its heels. There needs to be a way to describe the application, its structure and dependencies once and then get the infrastructure to work for the application. When IT departments can successfully model the application and all of its compute, storage and networking components, the application becomes truly portable. The technology that achieves this is now available, and we predict it will go mainstream in 2016.
This new focus onto applications is not lost on the IT industry. Entering the new year, infrastructures will head into the wings as applications take center stage while vendors race to develop application-centric solutions. VMware, for example, is extending its unified hybrid cloud platform with “software-defined solution” to support its “One Cloud, Any Application, Any Device” strategy. Its competitor Cisco is promoting application-centric, software-defined networking technologies for simplifying and automating network configurations based on the needs of the application. IT organizations are in the early stages of taking advantage of this new application-defined infrastructure model. As a result, they require application management tools that support the application-centric model by facilitating application portability and long-term lifecycle management.
As we look ahead to 2016, the focus is shifting from hybrid clouds to application portability. IT organizations are developing strategies that couple both application portability and manageability. We expect the movement of applications between clouds will further accelerate the adoption of hybrid computing, which will force vendors to vigorously compete to command control over the way businesses capture, or profile, their applications and deploy them across this diverse new world.
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About the Author
An industry veteran with more than 25 years of executive leadership and marketing experience in fast-growth technology businesses, David Cope is CliQr’s EVP of Corporate Development and CMO, responsible for business development, strategic alliances and marketing.
