How Applications will or will not Meet the Cloud in 2015
The New Year is a time for resolutions and the enterprise is making some of its own. Beginning with leaving behind the memories of growing pains in cloud computing and coming into a higher, or maybe deeper, level of transformation.
In 2015 as enterprise IT becomes even more complex, the dollar spend put towards the cloud shall remain a priority. According to recent IDG research called Computerworld Forecast 2015 that surveyed 194 IT professionals, more than 40 percent of the respondents said their organizations will spend more on software as a service (SaaS) and a mix of public, private, hybrid and community clouds. Additionally, cloud computing initiatives are the single most important initiative today, deployed in 16 percent of IT departments surveyed.
Seeing as how the appeal of the cloud is catching the eyes of those spending the money, it’s safe to say that the enterprise is going to leverage it into additional forays, while ensuring not too rattle the foundation at the core of the business mission: security and revenue.
Here are three predictions for the upcoming year:
Cloud agility will drive non-core apps into public clouds.
Successful enterprises that view IT as a strategic differentiator will start driving non-core applications into public clouds, for two reasons.
-The speed and agility that cloud provisioning offers over internal IT provisioning can offer a strategic advantage and drive the business forward. This trumps the relative costs (or cost savings) of cloud infrastructure irrelevant.
-Enterprises that (rightly) see their customer’s Internet experience as an extension of their brand experience realize that any delays adversely affect them in the market place – and most IT projects take longer than desired as it is, so saving weeks (or months) on the provisioning cycle can be significant.
Production applications stepping up to the cloud:
During the last two years, the enterprise familiarized itself with cloud usage for some DevOps and QA environments. Now, they are ready to move production applications into the cloud. I have even heard several times of plans to move the entire infrastructure into the cloud, within a seven year time frame. The initial roll out will be non-core applications because enterprise IT developers need time to develop experience in building cloud ready applications, where scalability and performance can be achieved without resorting to specialized hardware, tuning, or vertical scaling, instead of using horizontal scaling systems that are tolerant of failures that will occur in clouds, (such as lambda architecture). Currently, most of that experience is present in SaaS companies.
Core mission critical applications are staying put:
In other words, core mission critical applications are going to remain in enterprise controlled and managed datacenters, at least for the next few years since the risks of giving up that control are too high and IT knows this. However, the management and monitoring of hybrid infrastructure will make for an area of keen interest.
Just in the past year, the enterprise has come quite a long way with the cloud. Companies like IBM are calling it a breakthrough year for their cloud business, as other are leaving behind their initial skepticism surrounding and seeking more ways to leverage the cloud in the long term. Meanwhile, research firm Markets and Markets estimates the global cloud market is expected to hit $121 billion next year.
Not all this change is easy, but the enterprise is bound to get closer than it ever has before.
Originally published on VMblog.com.