Praveen Rangnath, Sr. Director of Cloud Marketing, Splunk, shares his vision for where the cloud is headed in 2017:

• Building from the cloud up: Organizations will begin to see the cloud not only as their infrastructure of choice but will embrace it as a foundational driver of innovation (cloud-native).
• No more cloud price wars: The race to zero is over. 2017 will be less about cloud price and more about agility and innovation.
• Different cloud strategies normalize: We’ll see more vendors deploy cloud-agnostic services that can work across all cloud providers and strategies. We will see more companies investing in long-term strategic cloud partnerships, ensuring their partners embrace others in the cloud ecosystem to ensure delivering powerful solutions for customers.
• Cloud providers harness IoT: Today’s “smart home” concept will grow to become a smart enterprise, powered by the cloud. Connected technologies, from voice-recognition services such as Amazon Alexa to thermostats like Nest, will start seeing enterprise adoption.
• Traditional industries and cloud vendors finally meet halfway: While there will always be some level of skepticism among them, their lack of trust is decreasing
• Pace of innovation is unpredictable: The next big innovation from the cloud will be something that no one today is predicting.

Zohar Alon, CEO of Dome9 sees:

In the past couple of years, we saw the continued onslaught by public cloud services on traditional datacenter IT businesses and solution providers, and 2017 is promising to be an eventful one for enterprises worldwide. Here’s a quick review of what you’re likely to see in 2017.

• Enterprises will discover the Private Cloud emperor has no clothes: For years, legacy IT vendors have propped up the notion that enterprises can deploy and manage private IT infrastructure with comparable economics and ease of use to pubic clouds. Slow-moving CIOs in search of a “cloud strategy” have unsuccessfully tried to replicate with datacenter hardware and shrink-wrapped software what cloud providers such as AWS have built at scale. The tide is finally turning in favor of public clouds. Public cloud services such as Amazon  Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure are growing at a torrid pace even as datacenter server and storage shipments stall. In 2017, the industry will recognize private clouds for what they really are – a marketing ploy.

• Datacenter vendors will scramble to strike public-private partnerships: As enterprise customers look for painless migration to the public cloud, datacenter hardware and software vendors without a ramp to one or more public cloud services will find their days numbered. In 2016, we saw VMware bite the bullet and strike a partnership with long-time rival AWS. In the coming year, we will see more datacenter IT vendors announce partnerships and integrations with the popular public cloud services. For most businesses that have already embraced a cloud-first approach and are rapidly moving to a cloud-only strategy, the ramp to the public cloud will be in one direction without a return to private datacenters.

• A big wave of lift-and-shift is coming: The first wave of cloud adoption was driven by technology companies and software developers building and running new applications in the cloud. These early adopters that started with a clean slate drove innovation in microservices-based application architectures. The next wave will come from enterprises migrating their existing mission-critical applications to the cloud. AWS is continuing to announce new products and services targeting enterprise customers moving traditional applications to their cloud. Enterprise customers looking for managed services and frameworks to facilitate migration will create a massive opportunity around providing enterprise-class managed services.

• IT organizational transformation will drive the adoption of cloud-native solutions: Enterprises moving their applications to the public cloud for the first time often try to use the same architectural approaches and tools that they are familiar with in the datacenter. Products built for traditional datacenters either don’t work or don’t use the public cloud optimally. But now, we are starting to see IT leaders who are unburdened by the legacy approaches to workload management and security. This new generation of leaders will look for new tools, platforms and processes that are designed from the ground up for the public cloud. This shift will drive the need for cloud-ready training and certification as demand for these skills ramps up.

• Identity will emerge as the final frontier of cloud security: Identity and access management (IAM) is one of the pillars of infrastructure security both within the datacenter and in the cloud. In the software-defined world of the public cloud, where network perimeters are fluid and simple configuration changes can expose private resources to the world, IAM serves as the last line of defense for an enterprise’s assets. The rise of new computational models such as serverless computing that depend on IAM for protection will further drive the need for a strong, well-architected IAM security posture.