Cloud computing was really born just over ten years ago and after a few stumbles and early course corrections, the pace of innovation is now accelerating dramatically.
Enterprises’ increasing reliance on the cloud to deliver the agility and scale their customers and partners demand now means that data protection and Availability are pivotal concerns. Any firm can have the best, AI-based customer intelligence platform in the world, but if it’s not available for days, there can be a real, tangible impact to the business.
But as the cloud computing landscape continues to rapidly evolve, it can be difficult to predict what the future holds. However, the Veeam team has broken out the crystal ball and here are four key themes for the cloud in 2018:
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- Multi-cloud environments will become the norm as no single cloud platform is perfect for every workload. The tools and platforms for managing across them will continue to mature and drive seamless integration across clouds. It’s no longer a question of “if” an organization will move some or all of its assets to the cloud, but “when” and “how.” There is a plethora of ways in which companies can leverage cloud platforms and it’s now become a matter of “which ones should I leverage?” Solving the move to the cloud increasingly requires a multi-cloud approach and a corresponding portfolio of management and operational tools. Software providers understand this and will continue to improve their offerings to make seamless integration across the cloud landscape a reality.
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- Cloud-native applications will surge as enterprises of all sizes and ISVs (independent software vendors) hone their ability to define and deliver applications/solutions that are conceived and architected to take advantage of cloud platforms. The cost, scale and efficiency benefits of cloud native applications are now too compelling to ignore, and with swift advances in essential technologies like micro services and supporting development tools, cloud native applications will accelerate into the mainstream.
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- Cloud scale database services (e.g. Azure Cosmos, Google Cloud Spanner and services from AWS) will enable hyper-scale, highly distributed and mission-critical applications to become reality; they will also further increase the appetite for infusing data and analytics into every application delivered in the cloud. Compelling characteristics such as low-latency, scale out and geo-distribution will provide the type of horsepower IOT and numerous other global-scale applications require.
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled through cloud platforms will begin permeating across enterprises, industries and applications. While we aren’t quite at the level of HAL from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” technologies like Alexa, Cortana and Siri are demonstrating the power and potential impact of AI in everyday life. For businesses, the capabilities of machine learning, powered by petabytes of data and insanely fast compute resources will impact consumer experiences, biotech research, financial modeling and a myriad of other applications.
What does this mean for the data protection and availability landscape? It means building availability into robust cloud-based solutions from the very beginning must become a priority. There is no question that we’re in an age of exciting advances and incredible opportunity and every enterprise on the planet has the ability to accelerate their growth in ways they may not have thought possible.
Availability is no longer a choice because everyone has the fundamental expectation that their digital lives won’t be disrupted. If and when these predictions become reality, the necessity of having robust and effective data protection and availability solutions becomes all the more critical.