2017 Cloud Predictions: Better Hardware Refresh Therapy

By Jack M. Germain

The cloud industry had quite a year in 2016. This year will be better. The cloud industry will continue to introduce developments that will make a splash in the IT world. These splashes will create ripples that change the way companies do business and handle their data.

Bluelock CTO Pat O’Day has pinpointed nine cloud technology trends that will start the ripples flowing. His company was recently recognized by Gartner’s 2016 Critical Capabilities Report for Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service. I present his predictions here in no hierarchical order.

“If you look at one change, it is going to be that with the discreet applications, business functions or use cases, cloud is going to be the preferred way of doing those things. The growth is really just starting,” he said.

More companies will use the cloud to avoid hardware refresh.

Chalk up this churn in the hardware space to virtualization. Refreshing IT systems with new hardware every five years is a money pit.

O’Day said most CFOs will no longer sign off on spending money on a massive hardware refresh. They will ask you to look for alternatives.

“This is a new phase of cloud adoption driven by a company’s legacy hardware. We are seeing lots of movement to the cloud from companies that two or three years ago bought or leased new hardware and now have to refresh that hardware. Their alternative is the Cloud First concept,” O’Day said.

Availability and resiliency will emerge more specifically in compliance regulations and legislation.

More compliance regulations and legislation will include IT resiliency as a standard requirement. Contributing factors include increased pressure for convenience, the possibility of getting fined or fired for a breach, and personal risk mitigation.

Be prepared to prove you have an IT disaster recovery (DR) plan in place. Expect more industry requirements in this plan, according to O’Day.

Cloud vendors with incomplete solutions will form surprising alliances.

Companies without cloud industry solutions will be left behind in the crowded landscape of competition. So, expect to see surprising alliances forming to mitigate weaknesses.

New SaaS will emerge to help manage cloud-based resiliency.

A new science is growing around resiliency. Credit Software-as-a-Service technology improvements as well as an inherent link to the efficiency of people and process for this.

Data protection is now a table stakes investment. The demand to perform tasks and receive service through software with the streamlined convenience of enterprise platforms will grow.

Cloud adoption will become normal in even the most pragmatic industries, such as legal and healthcare.

Apprehension will continue to recede about storing sensitive data in a cloud environment. Even the most pragmatic industries are now getting on the cloud bandwagon, according to O’Day.

Why? Two reasons. One, the accessibility of cloud has created an expectation for continuous service. This focus will drive intense competition for client retention. Two, industries are beginning to see the immense value in leveraging cloud for their business objectives.

Owning a datacenter will not be fashionable for most CIOs.

The days of managing your own datacenter will disappear. CIOs will spurn the complications of in-house datacenters to provision their hosting and recovery environments with trusted third-party vendors.

“I think what is happening to datacenters now is many of them maintained by private companies are going away. I haven’t seen any evidence that datacenter companies are going out of business. The attrition seems to be within private companies,” said O’Day.

The gain? No more “keeping the lights on” activities. IT teams will focus on giving back more meaningful value to their business.

“A key factor is companies paying for a second datacenter just to have a disaster recovery solution. Now, they are moving that second datacenter to the cloud and eliminating it,” O’Day noted.

Machine learning will predict application downtime and duration.

The Internet of Things and Big Data have driven huge developments for higher living standards. Machine learning has emerged as part of this goal. In 2017, O’Day predicts an increased use of business intelligence to make predictions.

For example, machine learning that predicts recoverability will continue to grow more granular as users set policies and make decisions for wider business initiatives based upon this real-time information, O’Day suggested.

Enterprise data breaches will eclipse breach numbers in the cloud.

The raw data already shows this trend developing. It will continue. Security for sensitive data will remain a hot-button issue. But it will not be an adoption impediment.

“The gap [in favor of the cloud] is so significant that it is hard to imagine that even if all the clouds got hacked the tipping point over enterprise would be reached,” O’Day emphasized.

Enterprises will see the cloud as more secure than what they can do themselves, he noted. He sees a bigger issue with customer demand for continuous service. If you are not providing this constant availability, you will struggle to keep up in 2017, he said.

Security incidents will increasingly be handled as disasters.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR or BC/DR) are closely related. They both involve how an organization prepares for unforeseen risks to continued operations.

“The impact of security incidents can cause more than the damage from a fire,” said O’Day. “This leads to Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) ownership of BC/DR.”

Security professionals have strengths in incident response and management. This means companies will look to the CISO for DR planning as the reputation fallout becomes a larger concern for brands.

Please feel free to share below any comments or insights about Jack’s 2017 cloud computing predictions — or your own. And if you found this blog useful, consider sharing it through social media.

About the blogger: Jack M. Germain is a veteran IT journalist whose outstanding IT work can be found regularly in ECT New Network’s LinuxInsider, and other outlets like TechNewsDirectory. Jack’s reporting has spanned four decades and his breadth of It experience is unmatched. And while his views and reports are solely his and don’t necessarily reflect those of Linode, we are grateful for his contributions. He can be followed on Google+.