The Year in Cloud
The VAR Guy reached out to several cloud experts to see what they thought 2017 would bring in the market. Click through to see their predictions.
![The Year in Cloud The Year in Cloud](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/blta7e00ae59c0ca244/6538e9324e4ac04a67d25d21/Predict_trends_0.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
The VAR Guy reached out to several cloud experts to see what they thought 2017 would bring in the market. Click through to see their predictions.
Organizational transformation is well underway, as IT teams get trained on new cloud-native tools, techniques and processes for security, management, analytics and more. For the first time since the emergence of cloud computing, we are starting to see IT professionals who are unencumbered by the legacy approaches to management and security taking over leadership roles. These “born in the cloud” leaders will drive adoption of new tools, platforms and processes that are designed from the ground up for the public cloud rather than trying to use outdated models of security that worked in the data center but fail in the public cloud. Interestingly, this change of guard will create a need for cloud-ready training and certification as demand for these skills ramps up. – Zohar Alon, Co-Founder and CEO, Dome9
Increasingly focused on the “greening” of their IT operations and its effect on both capex and corporate reputation, distributed enterprises and mid-market leaders will continue seeking to outsource data center facilities and operations rather than building and operating their own. Highly aware of the increased visibility of IT generally, however, they will be sure to pick colocation and multicloud providers who lead the field in sustainability themselves. – Chris Sharp, CTO, Digital Realty
More sophisticated solutions will enable migration capabilities to also be used for cloud recovery and cloud Dev/Test by more easily moving workloads from any source (any data center, any cloud) to multiple clouds (AWS, Azure…). Channel partners won’t need to work with multiple solutions to build an automated migration factory for cloud migration whether the enterprise client wants to migrate to Azure or AWS. It is likely that additional cloud support such as Google and OpenStack will be added as “brownfield” migrations to these clouds grow in demand. In fact, in October AWS quietly launched a new service/tool for migrating on-prem apps to the cloud in a blog and with a new site, validating that automated cloud migration will be an important market for the channel in the coming year. – Raj Dhingra, CEO at CloudVelox
The customer base for public cloud services is shifting from early adopters and software developers who build and manage their own tools for security, analytics, etc. to enterprises that are looking for managed services and platforms that they can buy. This will create a massive business opportunity around providing enterprise-class managed services on top of one or more public cloud services catering to enterprise customers. Managed cloud services will make it easier and less risky to run production workloads in the public cloud. Consulting offerings designed to help enterprises make the transition from data center environments to the public cloud will fill a growing need. With public infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) offerings gaining mainstream adoption, 2017 will prove to be the coming-of-age of managed cloud services. – Zohar Alon, Co-Founder and CEO, Dome9
New automated solutions are tackling complex issues and making it easy to map existing datacenter infrastructure characteristics including compute, storage, network and security with matching cloud services. What was manual, time consuming and error-prone such as matching compute needs to the right compute cloud instance or mapping existing datacenter network design to the cloud is being made easy through automation. New automated capabilities such as right instance matching and cloud network customization enable enterprises to accelerate their cloud migrations and time to value. Automation is the key to making the cloud more strategic to enterprises by enabling them to do more projects faster and with the same amount of people; and enabling them to increase their addressable markets. – Raj Dhingra, CEO at CloudVelox
The low cost and ease of installation for most cloud based mobile SaaS applications makes them increasingly attractive to a highly mobile workforce that values flexibility and low physical device profile over the ability to conduct in-depth deliverable development. Continuing acceleration of mobile devices in the workplace will continue to drive cloud application/storage/SaaS adoption, even when IT is uninvolved (Shadow Cloud). – Chris Sharp, CTO, Digital Realty
This shift will have a profound impact on enterprise IT. Traditional data center infrastructure vendors perpetuated mistrust of public cloud security and pushed the private cloud alternative in order to protect their business. With growing acceptance of the public cloud by enterprises, traditional vendors will have to make a hard pivot, in many cases reversing their position. The deal between VMware and Amazon in October 2016 was a radical shift for VMware, but not entirely surprising given the intensifying push by businesses to go to the public cloud. We will see more such deals in 2017. – Zohar Alon, Co-Founder and CEO, Dome9
This shift will have a profound impact on enterprise IT. Traditional data center infrastructure vendors perpetuated mistrust of public cloud security and pushed the private cloud alternative in order to protect their business. With growing acceptance of the public cloud by enterprises, traditional vendors will have to make a hard pivot, in many cases reversing their position. The deal between VMware and Amazon in October 2016 was a radical shift for VMware, but not entirely surprising given the intensifying push by businesses to go to the public cloud. We will see more such deals in 2017. – Zohar Alon, Co-Founder and CEO, Dome9
The VAR Guy reached out to several cloud experts to see what they thought 2017 would bring in the market. Click through to see their predictions.
About the Author(s)
You May Also Like