Cloud 2019 Predictions (Part 6)

Given how fast technology is changing, we thought it would be interesting to ask IT executives about what they see on the horizon for 2019. Here are more predictions about the cloud in the coming year:

Andreas Pettersson, CEO at Arcules

Advancements in cloud technologies have completely expanded the potential of video cameras beyond simply recording surveillance footage. The ripples of this innovation can be seen in industries ranging from physical security to business optimization in the retail industry. This past year, many security professionals moved their surveillance to the cloud to get a unified view across locations and take a more proactive approach to physical security. Looking to next year, businesses can expect to reap the benefits of moving their video data to the cloud. Gone are the days of reviewing DVDs, or worse, videotapes, of security footage. Instead, cloud video surveillance is able to provide an actionable level of insight ranging from building controls to security enhancements.

Neil Barton, CTO, WhereScape

Cloud-first is the new norm. In 2019, large enterprises will fully embrace this stance and will expend considerable resources on creating and maintaining hybrid cloud environments. Alongside this, as businesses modernize their data infrastructure, we’ll also see a move to being automation-first – making automation of data ingestion and processing a standard part of any cloud migration effort.

New environments bring fresh challenges, and companies making this transition will not only be evolving how they work to best leverage the cloud, but they will also be navigating working within an infrastructure where the data resides both on-premises and on different cloud environments. Companies will need to become more agile in how they execute a multi-cloud strategy, so we will see increasingly rapid adoption and development of new cloud environments, powered by automation,

Alan Conboy, Office of the CTO, Scale Computing 

Next year will be a defining year for edge and hybrid computing strategies as IoT and the global network of sensors pile on more data than the average cloud has had to handle in the past. This transition will officially crown edge computing as the next big thing. According to a study from IDC, 45 percent of all data created by IoT devices will be stored, processed, analyzed and acted upon close to or at the edge of a network by 2020. In the process, edge computing will take on workloads that struggle on hosted cloud environments, passing the torch over to HCI platforms.

Ziv Kedem, CEO, Zerto 

It is important not to make downtime vulnerability an "acceptable" risk, in order to focus on continuous development, speed, and performance. We hope, in 2019, more business leaders will opt for technologies that provide assurances that all workloads, data, and applications are protected no matter where they reside, where they are moved to or what outside influences impact them. Achieving this, without slowing the pace of business transformation, will be the great technology challenge that business leaders should look to overcome in 2019.

Kim Weins, VP of Cloud Strategy, Flexera

In 2019, the historic growth of cloud usage will continue, with a few new twists.

Enterprises create cloud “centers of excellence” to focus on cloud governance: According to the RightScale 2018 State of the Cloud Report, 57 percent of enterprises already have a central cloud team or center of excellence with another 24 percent planning one. These central teams are focusing on planning which applications to move to cloud (69 percent), optimizing costs (64 percent), and setting cloud policies (60 percent). Cloud teams are increasingly looking to automated policies to continuously govern and optimize across all of their public clouds.

Software licensing becomes a critical component of cloud cost optimization: As organizations migrate more applications to cloud, software licensing costs become a key part of the cost picture. The software vendors who provide public cloud services are using pricing as incentives to drive users to their own cloud. Microsoft’s Azure Hybrid Benefit is taking hold as a way for Azure users to reallocate excess cloud licenses or to “double dip” and use licenses both on-prem and in Azure. Oracle has taken the opposite approach, using their “core factor” licensing metrics to make it more expensive to run Oracle databases on AWS and Azure clouds. These price battles mean that customers must carefully analyze the full cloud cost picture, and provide oversight on software asset management across both on-prem and cloud environments to continuously match software entitlements with license consumption metrics. The stakes of mismanaging software licenses anywhere, on-prem or in the cloud, aren’t minimal. Software audits by mega-vendors can cost enterprises upwards of $500,000 in labor and true up costs and take 8 to 15 months.

Enterprises plan to grow public cloud spend across multiple clouds: Multi-cloud is here to stay. According to the RightScale 2018 State of the Cloud, 20 percent of enterprises with more than 1,000 employees plan to more than double public cloud spend. An additional 17 percent plan to increase cloud spend 50 to 100 percent. Overall, 71 percent of enterprises will grow public cloud spend more than 20 percent. Respondents are already running applications in 3.1 clouds and experimenting with 1.7 more for a total of 4.8 clouds used.

Steven Mih, CEO, Aviatrix

Cloud architectures will become more standardized. As with the evolution of any space, the cloud world is beginning to establish standards. For instance, there’s a great advantage to using a multi-cloud networking architecture that has been vetted across dozens of real-world enterprises’ environments, involving thousands of Virtual Private Clouds and connections with on-premises resources. Enterprises are moving toward cloud patterns and architectures that scale and evolve. That way, they can avoid the expense and hassle of having to redo architectures that were designed simply to work in the moment.

Cloud will create greater similarities among disparate enterprises. The irony is that although greater public cloud adoption will enable enterprises to be more heterogeneous and more specialized, it will also push in the other direction, as well. For example, every company will be a software company. Every company will be a data-driven, cloud-enabled, AI-savvy company—in the same way that today, every company uses electricity, computers, and communications devices.

Doug Dooley, COO, Data Theorem

Serverless applications will surpass applications built in Docker containers. In 2017, Docker reached 24% adoption while Lambda reached 23.5% adoption among Amazon Web Services customers. Yet, the adoption rate of serverless and cost savings are dramatically better than what virtual containers can offer. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are all pushing serverless because it’s easier and cheaper for their customers. Also, once apps are built using serverless frameworks, there’s a higher switch-over cost to go from one cloud to another. Brand loyalty is something every subscription service is hoping to achieve. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are strengthening their offerings with serverless in the cloud.

Vikram Makhija, GM of Cloud, Cloudera

As companies understand the value of cloud to their existing infrastructure and applications, choice will become increasingly important. Next year we expect to see a larger move to hybrid cloud, as more sophisticated tooling becomes available for enterprises to leverage both private and public cloud to gain flexibility everywhere and match their workloads and business needs more closely to their infrastructure.

Jonathan S. Weissman, Senior Lecturer, Rochester Institute of Technology

More companies will store data in the cloud—either in full or in a hybrid setup. The cloud infrastructures used by companies will be from different providers, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM SoftLayer, and others.

Ross Mason, Founder, MuleSoft

Cloud integration will mature. In 2019, the relentless march to the cloud will continue. However, most organizations have so far lacked a coherent, long-term cloud strategy. More often than not, new cloud services get deployed reactively. It results in cloud deployments that are messy and often dependent on point-to-point integrations. In a cloud-native era, vendor lock-in and traditional point-to-point integrations leave enterprises with tightly coupled and fragile architectures that prevent organizations from being adaptable.

In today’s digital world, it’s clear organizations need to build for change. In 2019, we’ll see more organizations start to look inwards to modernize their core so they can compete in today’s cloudy world. organizations will need to modernizing legacy systems, so they can co-exist with cloud infrastructure and applications. This is best achieved through an application network underpinned by APIs, which are language agnostic and can decouple on-premises system data from system-specific complexity. As a result, we’ll see APIs increasingly become an intermediary between legacy systems and the cloud.

Gary Tyreman, President and CEO, Univa

We will see a major shift for enterprises looking to migrate on-premise HPC to the cloud.  We anticipate a large shift in attitude when it comes to cloud adoption for 2019. 451 Research estimates that 90 percent of companies will be in the cloud by 2019. Furthermore, the cloud category is the fastest growing HPC category at 14-18 percent. New frameworks, containers and cloud are changing how enterprises look at technical computing, to name a few factors. We envision richer solutions moving up the stack into the software layers as public cloud providers broaden their solutions. Also, we see more HPC-style computing offerings, including high speed interconnects, broader bare-metal services, and packaged data management and synchronization solutions.

Extreme scale automation is finally moving to the cloud. Thanks to compute-intensive application’s industries, such as genomics, semiconductor and financial services, to name a few, scientists and engineers are using high performance computing (HPC) to help solve their most complex problems. Requirements to run jobs frequently include big compute, high-throughput, and fast networking. Until recently, the cloud simply wasn’t an option for these workloads because there was too much data to move, or costs were too high. That said, we are now seeing cloud providers have advanced to a point that the same type of on-premise infrastructure and services can be replicated in the cloud. Also, many life sciences, deep learning and semiconductor design organizations are under tremendous pressure to build quality products and get to market faster, which often demands extensive computer simulation. As a result, we will be seeing more and more large cluster workloads for these types of industries in the one or two million core count size. These enterprises will be looking to get results faster through extreme scale and will need a policy automation tool that allows their organizations to dynamically create, scale and tear-down cloud-based infrastructure in response to changing workload demand.

Laurent Bride, CTO, Talend

The business multi-verse expands through multi-cloud as data inefficiencies are solved. Multi-cloud promises tremendous reward if it can be used properly, but data inefficiencies and complicated compliance policies hinder progress for many. 2019 will see some of those data inefficiencies fade away as effective data strategies are implemented and new technologies unleash true multi-cloud functionality to the masses.