Realty Check: 2015 Technology Drivers

1. Emergence of Hybrid
Increasingly, enterprises are having to deal with their internal “users” consuming cloud services from an array of different providers. The need for data integration and access platforms, permitting seamless interoperability, between working at the on-premise environment and in the cloud will become a key focus for organisations in 2015.

Data centres offering enterprises a flexible deployment platform encompassing ease and agility of access and provisioning from their own environments to a critical mass of indigenous Cloud Service Providers will underpin the emerging Hybrid Cloud platform. This, together with supporting the pairing requirements associated with how an enterprise’s Wide Area Network interconnects its on-premise environments to private and semi-private outsourcing and finally into the public cloud, will greatly facilitate Hybrid cloud adoption decisions.

2. Internal IT function & Proof of Concepts
IT departments are increasingly having to balance management of their existing IT estate with a need to facilitate and provide governance structures around public and private cloud consumption models. The key challenge for enterprises is that this evolution moves a skill-set from that of specialist (in storage or other technologies) to that of operation and governance officer because of how cloud is measured - in cost ($/£) and performance (service levels and quality of service) terms.

That said, providing the ability for enterprises to deploy and un-deploy quickly in the cloud, helps them better understand these metrics and ultimately drives adoption, particularly in the case of a Hybrid Cloud platform with a number of participants in the ecosystem that can have influence on the overall Service Level.

In 2015, Proof of Concepts and extended pilot projects will be a key qualification technique for being able to compare and contrast different offerings in the Hybrid Cloud space specifically centred on interoperability, access, service aggregation and operational complexity.

3. In Country/Proximate Hosting (Sovereignty and Performance)
Whilst data protection and sovereignty will continue to be the key driver for in country hosting in 2015, evolving application performance requirements are also driving a need for more proximate hosting. A large proportion of participants in the public Cloud Service Provider space are already responding to these pressures by deploying in cloud clusters centred on greater metropolitan areas.

Application type and performance requirements are also evolving to support a proliferation of new device types being connected at the network edge (Internet of Things - IoT). Whilst not always “tied” to a person at an edge device, IoT deployments will be most dense in metropolitan areas where their value, underpinning smart cities, grids and healthcare, will be most evident.