It is likely that your approach to cloud infrastructure adoption was cautious at first. You may have limited your focus to rapid provisioning, or reducing equipment and operational costs. But the benefits of the cloud have been impossible to resist. It continues to evolve, gaining credibility across every industry. Today, we expect all enterprise systems to have the transformative aspects of the cloud and you will see that the Iaas landscape in 2017 has even more to offer.
Cloud-based mission-critical workloads will take off
Cloud has long promised the migration of all enterprise production workloads. But that migration has yet to happen. The chief barrier to cloud migration remains a lack of commitment and recourse to support production service-level agreements. On one hand, cloud providers are limiting their accountability as they lack the talent to support custom portfolios. On the other, they are failing to provide sufficient control into the public datacentre to self-manage service-level agreements. The IaaS provider, best equipped to take more responsibility and deliver the control tenants demand, will be the one to drive cloud migration in 2017.
Corporate datacentre numbers will plummet
Just a few years ago, this statement would have seemed outrageous. But now it seems all but inevitable. As organisations focus their IT spending on cloud computing, they will begin to shift their workloads from corporate-owned datacentres to purpose-built facilities, managed and run by enterprise cloud providers. Oracle CEO, Mark Hurd predicts that we will see corporate-owned datacentre numbers fall 80% by 2025, and that the same percentage of IT spending will be devoted to cloud services. While corporate datacentre numbers may not fall straight away, we do expect an immediate reduction in direct investment for compute capacity, storage and networking services.
Enterprise cloud most secure place for IT processing
This year’s threat landscape will be highly changeable. External threats, coupled with the need for better governance and privacy mandates, will make security a key priority for all lines of business. According to Frost & Sullivan, cloud computing security services in the UAE is set to grow to $72.3 million by 2019. In the past year, security was a major barrier to cloud investment. Data sovereignty, data privacy and control issues deterred many organisations from pursuing cloud adoption. But in the future, those very concerns will be the things that draw new organisations to the cloud. Established cloud vendors with security track records have the expertise and resources to deploy layers of defense that many companies simply cannot duplicate in-house.
Cloud empowers small business innovation
The cloud has become a catalyst for small-business growth, allowing them to innovate freely, carve out new markets, and disrupt the status quo. The digital economy demands that companies of all sizes compete based on technology-enabled value. While some seek to evolve existing business practices, others are striving to launch new services that exploit extensive, low-cost computational power. Traditionally, access to such a high-performance resource has been too expensive for smaller businesses. But what once cost $100 million up front, is now available for $10 per hour. The cloud is allowing small businesses to innovate, experiments and sustain ongoing profitability.
60% of IT organisations move systems management to cloud
Over 90% of companies have multiple systems management tools, but just 6% trust their incomplete data. Consequently, IT operations professionals struggle to create effective management approaches. The pace of business is increasing. As more organisations adopt DevOps practices and focus on digital experience, they will need to eliminate management data silos and embrace machine learning just to keep up. Some have already embraced systems management in the cloud, unifying management data across multiple clouds and on premises. Others are benefiting from data science applied to the operational management problem. By 2020, 60% will have moved their most critical systems management use cases to the cloud.
Key takeaways
- As organisations focus IT spending on cloud computing they will begin to shift workloads from corporate-owned datacentres to purpose-built facilities managed by enterprise cloud providers
- By 2020 60% organisations will have moved their most critical systems management use cases to the cloud
- Established cloud vendors with security track records have expertise and resources to deploy layers of defense that many companies simply cannot duplicate in-house
- IaaS provider best equipped to take responsibility and deliver the control tenants demand will be the one to drive cloud migration
Increasing gains from Infrastructure-as-service will drive migration away from corporate datacenters in the years ahead, argues Ahmed Adly at Oracle.