The Cloud Predictions 2015 and Beyond

By: Karan Kirpalani, Associate Vice President, Product Management, Netmagic

Hybrid Cloud Will be the Biggest Gainer in 2015 and Beyond

Cloud computing has been slowly and steadily making inroads into the enterprise segment simply because of the agility and the scalability it provides.

Leading research firm, Gartner, expects adoption of cloud computing to hit $250 billion by 2017 and current enterprise trends back this prediction up. These are enterprises that are increasingly relying on cloud to develop, market and sell products, manage supply chains and more.

Private Cloud, however, will continue to see traction In India in those industries where compliance and regulatory needs outweigh the need for scalability and elasticity.

Going forward into 2015, we are of the opinion that:

The Biggest Gainer will be the Hybrid Cloud

Quoting Gartner again, more than 50 percent of enterprises worldwide will have hybrid clouds by 2017. Although pure implementation of cloud is a rarity because of the complexity of enterprise IT environments, the hybrid cloud – a mix of on and off premise – promises the best of both worlds.

Analysts world over agree that hybrid cloud will be the biggest gainer in 2015. More and more medium and large-sized organizations are discovering that a hybrid approach provides a near-perfect combination of cost, performance and scalability.

We too feel that big organizations with regulatory and compliance restrictions will increasingly adopt a hybrid cloud approach to move to the cloud.

‘On-Demand’ to be in High Demand in 2015

India is seeing a strong shift toward true on-demand capabilities, and not just within the Public Cloud, but for Bare Metal and Hosted Private Cloud as well.

Customers across segments want the flexibility of being able to self-provision and deploy infrastructure across all compute models within minutes. Service providers that are able to provide on-demand, self-provisioned Bare Metal within 20-60 minutes with options for configuring these devices within a hosted private cloud will offer significant value to the market.

We are of the opinion that this will be a turning point in cloud adoption by enterprises that are looking at streamlining their IT infrastructures at an affordable cost.

Cross-Cloud Orchestration will Differentiate Service Providers

As LoBs (Lines of Business) start defining IT policies and Shadow IT (see box item) becomes an accepted reality, the need for a single interface to manage infrastructure from different providers becomes a very handy tool for enterprises. Providers that offer cross-cloud orchestration will enable their customers to provision and manage infrastructure across various providers all through a single web interface or app.

Increased Application Availability and Development on the Cloud

Quoting from Global Technology Outlook: Cloud 2014, over a quarter of all applications built (numbering approximately 48 million) will be on cloud by 2016. This would set the pace for business enterprises to make cloud an inherent part of their IT Infrastructures.

According to a report by analyst firm IDC; over 85% of applications built today are for the cloud.

Cloud as the Strategic Differentiator and Accelerator of Innovation

According to the Enterprise Cloud Adoption Survey by the Everest Group, over 56% enterprises consider cloud as a strategic differentiator and about 58% of enterprises spend upwards of 10% of their IT budget on cloud services.

Cloud’s inherent ability to increase operational efficiencies will work as a catalyst for organizations to accelerate innovation within. Enabled by the cloud, enterprises will be able to reach out to customers faster and more efficiently with innovative products and solutions.

The days of skepticism around the cloud are long gone - the Cloud is here to stay. Let us give a warm welcome to the new era in Cloud Computing.