Organizations are still skeptical of investing in the cloud and planning for the future, now that 2018 has arrived is no different. Enterprises are looking at ways to secure their data while also staying at the cutting edge. A few experts offer their predictions for cloud and multi-cloud platforms in 2018.
- Multi-cloud will be the New Normal: With the Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) wars heating up, players such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure continue to attempt to outdo each other on all vectors including capabilities, price, and service. For most, however, it’s about efficiency and cost. Multi-cloud means choice and the opportunity to leverage the best technology for the business challenges they face. Unfortunately, multi-cloud is not realistic for all, only the largest corporations who have the IT teams and expertise to research and test out the latest and greatest from multiple providers. Even those mega-corporations are finding that they have to stick to a single IaaS Cloud partner to focus their efforts. Today’s Modern Data Management PaaS are naturally multi-cloud, seamlessly keeping up with the best components and services that solve business problems. Acting as technology portfolio managers for large and small companies who want to focus on nimble and agile business execution, these platforms are democratizing the notion of multi-cloud for everyone’s benefit. - Ramon Chen, Chief Product Officer at Reltio
- Multi-cloud will become more common: In 2018, enterprises will make fundamental changes in big data access by moving towards multi-cloud strategies encompassing several cloud vendors, enabling them to decrease costs and enhance efficiency. The increasing adoption of the semantic layer and information fabrics, combined with cloud computing capabilities, is becoming common ways of accessing all enterprise data using shared business meaning and understanding. - Sean Martin, CTO and co-founder of Cambridge Semantics
- Organizations will further leverage the cloud to reduce costs: The cloud has shifted from a place primarily used for storage to becoming accepted as a place to put real production workloads. Cloud adoption across organizations will continue to rise in 2018 and beyond, whether in public, private or hybrid clouds: in fact, many organizations are predicted to be 100% cloud within the next five years. As organizations look to control costs, outsourcing a variety of functions to being managed in a public or hybrid cloud is looking more attractive. - Keith Kohl, VP of product management, Trillium Software
- The evolution of cloud will continue: Cloud continues to evolve more and more as cloud providers are turning to the protection and security capabilities that both enterprises and buyers need. More control is still required whether its cryptography, keys or identity, and continued investment in enterprises is a growing trend to make cloud more like their world. We can expect that users on-prem will still be able to have a seamless experience with things that are spun out to the cloud but remain harmonized. There is a collective appetite for greater enterprising of the cloud. - Sol Cates, VP of technical strategy, Thales eSecurity and Jim DeLorenzo, solutions marketing manager, Thales eSecurity
- Making the cloud more secure will continue to be a top priority: Collaboration between nimble private companies and the behemoth Blue Chip tech players on how to make the cloud more secure, including an increased focus on hybrid clouds, multi-cloud management and a modern container-based approach will become the rule instead of the exception. - Ankur Laoria, Strategic Solutions Leader, Alfresco