In an amazingly short span of a couple or so years, Cloud Computing has become an integral, perhaps even the most vital part of an enterprise’s IT Strategy. It has helped free-up a huge chunk of the IT from the constrictions of legacy software and hardware licensing data center models, and has opened, revolutionized and to an extent democratized the way IT delivers services and how the users access information, applications and business services.
But with the ever-increasing impact the cloud has on IT, there’s also a palpable confusion about how its full value to business can be harnessed, mainly because of the continuous and rapid evolution of the cloud and its related technologies and the growing flux of vendors using portentous hyperbolic marketing speak to sell their cloud solutions.
That is why it is essential for businesses to continually monitor computing trends to keep updating and adapting their cloud strategies to evade expensive oversights or encash market opportunities over the coming years.
Here are Five Strategic Cloud Computing Trends that will drive cloud strategies through 2015 and 2016, and which you must factor into your cloud-planning processes to run at the speed of change.
Hybrid Cloud Computing Is the Way Forward
Hybrid Cloud Computing means using a combination of public or private cloud services and physical application infrastructure and services.
As is evident from some recent developments/deployments, hybrid cloud computing is set to become an imperative, in the form of a unified integrated cloud model, consisting of both internal and external cloud platforms that can be leveraged based on specific business requirements.
Industry Analysts and Cloud Experts recommend that enterprises should center immediate efforts on integrating the application and dynamic data infrastructures to form a hybrid solution. To avoid oversights and other glitches, they should set guidelines and standards for how the public cloud application services or applications will combine with the various components of internal systems to ensure an efficient hybrid environment.
Cloud Services Brokerage Is Going to Be a Key Strategic Role of IT
Over the last year, Cloud Services Brokerage (CSB) has graduated from being an option to a key strategic factor for users and IT alike. CSB essentially involves a service provider playing a liaising role in assisting the consumption of cloud computing. CSB as a trend is predicted to gather speed over the next couple of years as users choose to use cloud services, independent of IT bureaucracy.
So, what the IT critically needs to do to uphold its relevance and significance is to find ways to position itself as an Enterprise CSB by creating simple, flexible, and business user-centric tools and processes (for instance modifying internal portals and service catalogs) that facilitate cloud adoption and encourage end users to seek IT’s assistance.
Cloud Friendly Decision Frameworks are Business Imperative
Even the greatest skeptic now agrees that Cloud Computing offers a plethora of completely indispensable features and benefits, like cost-effective use-based models of IT consumption and service delivery, greater agility and lesser complexity. It also allows IT to focus its resources on delivering new services that fuel innovation and accelerate business.
Yet, the success of your cloud adoption completely depends on whether your decision-making structure optimizes the gift of the cloud. You need first to ensure you alleviate any concerns that you have regarding performance, security, availability, and integration. Once you’ve satisfyingly crossed these issues, you can go about planning, implementing and optimizing your cloud strategy.
Application Design Must Be Cloud-Optimized
Now the way organizations go about cloud computing is to basically just transfer their enterprise workloads to the cloud or an application infrastructure. This is a good approach where the workloads need a variable supply of resources or where the application logically adapts to horizontal scalability.
But to fully extract the potential of your cloud model to deliver truly gold standard world class applications, you need to start designing applications that are cloud-optimized from paper to practice.
Future Datacenters Need to Adopt Implementation Models of Cloud Service Providers
In a cloud computing environment, the data center and other implementation details are handled by the service provider while the enterprise only concerns itself with service consumption.
But as enterprises carry on building/expanding their own data centers, they will be far better served applying the cloud computing implementation models of Cloud Service Providers to increase performance, efficiency, and agility.
These rapidly sprouting trends are already becoming best practices and they are bound to have profound implications on your cloud strategy, aggressively optimizing your cloud adoptions, and helping you stay abreast with the speed of change through next couple of years, if not more.
