It was a wonderful year to be a participant in the ever evolving Cloud Ecosystem. 2016 made it clear that the IaaS market is now a three horse race. AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Engine (GCE). There are other players obviously — they will continue to play in the niche market and verticals.
Over the past few weeks, AWS has made some major service announcements that are typical for AWS in and around their annual Reinvent conference. Here’s a quick summary of some of the key topics.
- AWS continues to disrupt (and annoy some competitors). With the Introduction with a (basic) free Denial of Service in Sheild, it will directly compete with current Cloud Security vendors and services such as Cloudflare.
- AWS Cloud adoption within the Enterprise market is maturing. Migrations are significantly becoming common place within the Fortune 1000, and the partner ecosystem is needed to assist with the change.
- Public Sector worldwide (especially in the US and UK markets) are leveraging the AWS Cloud, with a ‘Cloud First’ Approach.
- AWS continues to physically grow its footprint. With the back to back announcements of the Canadian (Central) and London Regions respectively — AWS continues to understand that there are regional and country-specific governance, compliance, and ‘mindset’ requirements. AWS is embracing the ‘if you build it, they will come’ mentality.
- AWS’ agility is enabling IoT market growth. Greengrass (announced at re:Invent) is pushing decision making to the edge of the cloud. The excitement of the service compares to the excitement around ‘Lambda’ when it was announced.
2017 will clearly begin on an escalated path.
- There will be a strong continuance on the 2016 momentum.
- In many organizations, Cloud Strategies will become Cloud Execution and Operations.
- Managed Services with the emphasis on 24/7 workload automation will continue to rise.
- Market Verticals that are typically ‘Cloud Adverse’ around the world will invest big to play catch up.
- AWS will Continue to Innovate by adding features and services to its offering.
As the year closes out, it is clear that the ‘Journey to the Cloud’ is just that. It may begin with a single step, but there are profound advantages to be had regardless of the size and scale of the adopter. This new phase in IT will be exciting to participate in. Business and Individuals that participate we be emboldened and their knowledge broadened.
In 2017, those that do not leverage the Cloud will loose out on its efficiencies in an agile and changing marketplace. Unfortunately, the effect will find them providing out of date business services to a reduced market. Embracing the cloud and the cloud ecosystem — will showcase business agility and the willingness to adopt in a very competitive world.