Cloud Computing Trends 2017 Unleashed

#DigitalErra
Jul 28, 2017 · 3 min read

When exploring strategies for the cloud, it is vital for executives to review relevant medium- to long-term trends and other factors that will affect the decision-making process.

Here are the trends this year, taking advantage of the latest offerings and the cloud’s economies of scale:

1. Big Data and the Mobile Cloud

Increased adoption of big data and mobile devices are major external trends that are converging to provide the perfect catalyst for increased adoption of hybrid cloud services in the medium term. As these major external trends become ubiquitous and the number of organizations laying out policies for bring-your-own-device, use of social media, and sensors increases, there will be an explosion of mobile, structured, and unstructured data.

2. IoT’s Play

According to a Forbes article regarding Forrester’s 2017 IoT predictions: “IoT will be distributed across edge and cloud, boosted by AI and containers. IoT software will be distributed across edge devices, gateways, and cloud services. IoT solutions will be built on modern micro-services and containers that work across this distributed architecture.” Despite the alteration in cloud architecture produced by the IoT’s ascending influence on the cloud in 2017, the IoT will likely become the most visible manifestation of the cloud — particularly as defined by the amount of data processed and utilized by it.

3. Cognitive Cloud changes everything

There’s huge opportunity to build cognitive capabilities into your cloud. Adding cognitive delivers machine-learning-based tools and features, smarter analytics, and new cognitive apps your customers will love. It’s the cognitive era, and it starts with your cloud strategy.

Here’s the problem. You don’t have a decade to make your cloud smarter. Your customers are ready.

4. Hybrid Cloud takes over

For most companies, the optimal cloud strategy is a hybrid approach. Not only can you harness the public cloud’s low-cost storage and app hosting, even at massive scales, but you can also use your local, private cloud to protect and use whatever data, processes, workflows and applications are important to you. You need flexibility and control across your public and private clouds.

5. Evolving Mobile

The growing mobile movement is partly responsible for the various cloud types which, in the coming year, will follow a basic paradigm devolving from public clouds (AWS, Azure, IBM Watson, etc.), to private, hybrid and industry-specific ones. Additionally, third-party service providers have traditionally played a pivotal role in the implementation of mobile technologies which, according to Forrester, may very well transition to greater enterprise autonomy since, “Many organizations outsourced their mobile projects to third parties in an attempt to keep up with nimble, disruptive start-ups. Now that mobile is mission critical to their business, leading firms will bring mobile in-house and use design-thinking to drive success.” The design of in-house cloud-based architecture will likely adhere to the aforementioned model if organizations choose to eschew third party providers.

6. Co-Location Services are on the rise

With most CIOs looking to cease running their own data centers but uncertain about which cloud to bet on, many are turning to co-location services from Equinix, Digital Realty and others, Forrester’s Bartoletti says. Co-los allow CIOs to move their systems to managed data centers, where they benefit from convenient connectivity to various public cloud and SaaS services.

“The beautiful thing about a co-lo is you’re one hop away from a direct high-speed connection to any public cloud provider,” Bartoletti says. “It makes it easier to have multi-cloud strategy.”

This also makes it easier for CIOs to test services from AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud without fully committing until they’re ready to migrate.

#DigitalErra

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