Cloud no longer is the next big thing, it is the king!
But what’s more glaringly apparent this year is organizations queuing up to embrace cloud technologies in a rather comprehensive sphere. That cloud, is set to permeate industries and find increasing acceptance is inevitable. And while there are many things that accompany cloud adoption, Multi-cloud, DevOps and Security reign high – especially in 2018. Here’s why.
#1 Cloud Strategy – it’s multi-cloud all the way
As per a MarketsandMarkets report, multi-cloud management market is said to peak at $4.5 billion (by 2022), with a CAGR of 30.9%. Gartner believes the top 10 public cloud providers will contribute 70% of the cloud services revenues by 2021.
What this proves is the sheer volume and role that the multi-cloud market will impact in the coming years.
‘’Most enterprises now have workloads running in the cloud, and many are starting to evaluate who their second cloud provider will be’’
Craig McLuckie, Co-Founder (Hepatio) & Co-Developer of Kubernetes
Not just that, multi-cloud embraces scalability and addresses data sovereignty and legal issues; cutting costs while saving time is undeniable by-products.
But don’t believe our word for it; Gartner concludes that multi-cloud usage will drive Cloud Management Platform growth in the years to follow.
Did we say there’s more?
Multi-cloud enables data, applications, and infrastructure to be shared easily, and placed across multiple platforms, helping avoid vendor lock-in and yes, hosting amazing backup options!
Choose from a suite of features and services customized to your enterprise and achieve increased redundancy.
So while the benefits are crystal clear, from a top management and CXOs point of view, the message is set in stone: “multi-cloud is the only way in 2018”, facilitating greater flexibility and scalability, while no longer being mandatory to place all eggs in one basket.
#2 Scale DevOps in a lean way, advance to operational excellence
Traditional workflows between operational and developmental teams have been completely re-imagined, all thanks to the new kid on the block – DevOps.
A Puppet study found that those organizations employing DevOps in their IT strategy, witnessed a whopping 200X in the number of deployments, and a mean of recovery that was a phenomenal 24X quicker!
The data only goes to prove one thing: DevOps by far is ‘the’ practice to adopt – if organizations were to have that all appealing ‘competitive-edge’.
And while the reasons to believe this are plenty, in a nutshell, DevOps tears silos between teams, reduce outages and increases deployment cycles.
The end result?
Operational excellence and Agility!
But now, going one step further and combining this with Cloud, the impact is straight off the books!
Here’s why.
For one, DevOps on Cloud means a central and unified platform to develop, test and deploy. DevOps Automation also allows for continuous integration and continuous development of tools. It equips developers with better control and monitoring capabilities. Not to mention, gargantuan cost savings, which by the way, is not even close to the tip of the iceberg!
But it doesn’t end there.
Add Containers to the mix, and what do we get?
Containers clubbed with DevOps creates transportable bits of applications and makes it easy for IT silos to work in tandem; large enterprises adopting microservices infrastructure will add to this almost northwards growth.
#3 Don’t dare compromise the Security of your Cloud
‘”Rapid growth in cloud adoption is driving increased interest in securing data, applications, and workloads that now exist in a cloud computing environment”
– Gartner
While there is no debate that cloud is the only way forward, it is imperative, if not advisable that an insurance cover is accounted for right in the beginning – in order to mitigate unavoidable and unforeseen accidents, which is just a side-effect of unsurmountable popularity.
This is where Cloud Security solutions come in.
Cloud security, as predicted by a Gartner report is said to touch $9.0 billion by 2020!
And of course, there are several reasons to support this trend.
For starters, the threat landscape in the form of malware, ransomware, and DDOS (distributed denial of services) attacks are terrifying, to say the least. Add to that, the attack surface of IT infrastructure is expanding, beyond reasonable limits!
Cybercriminals are getting increasingly savvy and are sharpening their weapons with sophisticated technologies – to not just breach, but cripple systems and protocols.
To put a lid on this, organizations cannot afford to lag behind on security blankets that provide better visibility of all the network layers, and also provide real-time detection and protection of infrastructures.
Human inputs and experience coupled with machine learning techniques will help predict attack-patterns and prevent further outbursts. While measures such as breach detection, sandboxing and sensor capabilities will administer endpoint security.
For CXO’s, the going gets only tougher in 2018, and the need of the hour is to up the ante on cloud security, in equal measure, as is the emphasis on moving to cloud itself.
