by Lori MacVittie, Technology Evangelist, F5 Networks
In 2016, IT professionals saw major shifts in the cloud computing industry, from developing more sophisticated approaches to application delivery to discovering the vulnerabilities of connected IoT devices. Enterprises continue to face increasing and entirely new security threats and availability challenges as they migrate to private, public and multi-cloud systems, which is causing organizations to rethink their infrastructures. As we inch toward the end of the year, F5 Networks predicts the key changes we can expect to see in the cloud computing landscape in 2017.
IT’s MVP of 2017? Cloud architects
With more enterprises adopting diverse cloud solutions, the role of cloud architects will become increasingly important. The IT professionals that will hold the most valuable positions in an IT organization are those with skills to define criteria for and manage complex cloud architectures.
Multi-cloud is the new normal in 2017
Over the next year, enterprises will continue to seek ways to avoid public cloud lock-in, relying on multi-cloud strategies to do so. They will aim to regain leverage over cloud providers, moving toward a model where they can pick and choose various services from multiple providers that are most optimal to their business needs.
Organizations will finally realize the full potential of the cloud
Companies are now understanding they can use the cloud for more than just finding efficiency and cost savings as part of their existing strategies and ways of doing business. 2017 will provide a tipping point for companies to invest in the cloud to enable entirely new scenarios, spurred by things like big data and machine learning that will transform how they do business in the future.
The increasing sophistication of cyber attacks will be put more emphasis on private cloud
While enterprises trust public cloud providers to host many of their apps, the lack of visibility into the data generated by those apps causes concerns about security. This means more enterprises will look to private cloud solutions. Public cloud deployments won’t be able to truly accelerate until companies feel comfortable enough with consistency of security policy and identity management.
More devices – More problems: In 2017, public cloud will become too expensive for IoT
Businesses typically think of public cloud as the cheaper business solution for their data center needs, yet they often forget that things like bandwidth and security services come at an extra cost. IoT devices generate vast amounts of data and as sensors are installed into more and more places, this data will continue to grow exponentially. This year, enterprises will put more IoT applications in their private clouds, that is, until public cloud providers develop economical solutions to manage the huge amounts of data these apps produce.
The conversation around apps will finally go beyond the “where?”
IT professionals constantly underestimate the cost, time and pain of stretching solutions up or down the stack. We’ve seen this with OpenStack, and we’ll see it with Docker. This year, cloud migration and containers will reach a point that customers won’t be able to just think about where they want to move apps, they’ll need to think about the identity tools needed for secure authentication and authorization, how to protect and prevent data loss from microservices and SaaS apps; and how to collect and analyze data across all infrastructure services quickly.
A new standard for cloud providers is in motion and this year will see major developments in not only reconsidering the value of enterprise cloud, but also modifying cloud strategy to fully extend enterprise offerings and data security. Evaluating the risks of cloud migration and management has never been as vital to a company’s stability as it is now. Over the course of the year, IT leaders who embrace and adapt to these industry shifts will be the ones to reap the benefits of a secure, cost-effective and reliable cloud.
About the Author
Lori MacVittie is Technology Evangelist at F5 Networks. She is a subject matter expert on emerging technology responsible for outbound evangelism across F5’s entire product suite. MacVittie has extensive development and technical architecture experience in both high-tech and enterprise organizations, in addition to network and systems administration expertise. Prior to joining F5, MacVittie was an award-winning technology editor at Network Computing Magazine where she evaluated and tested application-focused technologies including app security and encryption-related solutions. She holds a B.S. in Information and Computing Science from the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay, and an M.S. in Computer Science from Nova Southeastern University, and is an O’Reilly author.
MacVittie is a member of the Board of Regents for the DevOps Institute, and an Advisory Board Member for CloudNOW.
