Cloud 2014 – What’s next?

By Jonathan Wisler, EMEA General Manager SoftLayer.

  • 10 years ago Posted in

As the sun sets on another year, the tech world looks ahead with eager anticipation to 2014 and considers which trends will grow and what new opportunities will emerge. In 2013, the potential of cloud received a significant share of the technology spotlight, and the pressure is on for that potential to materialise in the upcoming calendar year.


Based on what we’ve learned from 2013, I thought I’d share a few predictions I have for the upcoming year:


“Enterprise Cloud” Reality
2014 will be the year that we finally see the enterprise cloud become a reality. Up until now, it seems that larger enterprises have been reluctant to jump headfirst into the cloud, deciding instead to stick a cautious finger in the air. Hosting data off-premise in a cloud environment had perceived security and performance drawbacks, so the extent to which many enterprises engaged in the cloud was generally limited to side projects test cases. Now though, the combination of successful cloud-based deployments, improvements in security and clearer information about cloud computing has softened many of the fears about cloud adoption.


For many people in the technology world, combining the terms enterprise and cloud seems like an uncomfortable juxtaposition. The ’enterprise’ moniker has become a loaded term due to perceptions of enterprise technology solutions as being massive, non-descript, stoic, super computer environments that sacrifice flexibility and scalability for improvements in reliability and power. On the other hand, cloud technology solutions are agile and scalable but with question marks about reliability and power. In 2014, we will see cloud environments able to replicate the traditional enterprise platform’s reliability and power at a fraction of the cost without sacrificing agility.


DevOpS
As cloud adoption increases, businesses have evolved their operations to take advantage of the new resources and capabilities of cloud platforms. The most visible and radical evolution has been the DevOps movement – an approach that marries development and operations to streamline and capitalise on available infrastructure resources. In 2014, DevOps will emerge as a viable (and necessary) approach to technology management.
With the growing need for big businesses to innovate and deliver off-the-shelf solutions faster than ever before, developers and IT operations teams are under even more pressure to get it right first time. Traditional methodologies are becoming increasingly outdated, and established on-premise companies are struggling to keep up with the pace of modern development techniques. This can be a source of real frustration for developers and IT teams alike. DevOps offers a genuinely agile and collaborative alternative.


We’ve seen companies embracing DevOps open themselves up to the advantage of continuous development, optimising required resources by granting developers faster access to new environments, a greater selection of tools and improved test control. IT teams meanwhile, retain control over environments and enjoy the benefits of cost and efficiency as offered by the cloud.


Hybrid Cloud
Much like the term enterprise, the word hybrid also carries a bit of a stigma. This is because the most general definition of hybrid computing is ‘a combination of two different computing environments.’ The term is often thrown around for ‘on-prem and off-prem’ implementations as well as ‘virtual and bare metal’ environments. Regardless of the definition, 2014 will usher in significant adoption of hybrid environments.


Given the flexibility and interconnectivity of computing environments, if a business isn’t leveraging a combination of technologies for its infrastructure platform, it’s either overpaying or underperforming. A hybrid environment solves these issues by using the right computing tool for each of its distinct and unique computing use cases.


Newer web-based companies built around the cloud enjoy a much more flexible existence than some of the more established businesses do. Mature companies’ existing infrastructure and processes can be cumbersome and expensive to change, but the financial and performance benefits of making those changes have finally brought us to a tipping point.


A few industries are already starting to embrace a hybrid cloud approach as an ideal solution for data storage. The financial sector in particular has slowly started implementing hybrid environments to store and access massive amounts of customer information securely and cost effectively. Diverse computing environments are becoming easier to integrate, freeing businesses to focus on their core competencies with a peace of mind that their cloud resources will be managed by businesses that specialise in serving and protecting data.


Niche Cloud Services
As IT organisations look to leverage the right infrastructure tools for every use case, entire SaaS and PaaS offerings are being built to complicate and optimise cloud infrastructure for specific applications. The most prevalent examples of that development in 2013 have been in the mobile and big data spaces.


While advances in mobile technology over the last decade have been astonishing, it’s clear that the traditional “centralised” office landscape is changing, becoming increasingly fragmented and leaving many businesses gradually more reliant on mobile devices. 2014 will likely see the proliferation of Mobile Cloud Networking (MCN) development, where mobile infrastructure will become a natural extension of the BYOD environments that many businesses run for CapEx or performance reasons.


In the big data space, several key players have made huge strides in simplifying the creation and management of scalable architectures. As a logical extension of a hybrid cloud approach to infrastructure and a DevOps approach to operations, these niche players will play a huge role in the evolving cloud landscape in 2014.