There are many new and evolving technology trends that have been what I will call “intriguing” to evaluate this year. I do feel that in the upcoming year many of the trends from last year will make a heavier footprint on the way we consume technology within business this upcoming year.
Below you will find the predictions of many of our industries great analytic minds. They have shared their predictions for technology strategy in 2017, and I included a couple of my own. Enjoy!
Cloud Strategy Defined and Internet of Things Development Continues
“2017 will be the year that if organizations are not ready to move to the cloud it will become part of their 3-5 year planning. Organizations looking for cloud-based services are recognizing that the larger cloud providers have their security strategies, and high availability options better defined. This definition clarifies what is the responsibility of the cloud provider, and what is yours. When it comes to security and system availability never assume, and always double-check. Also of interest is the business value around Internet of Things. A lot of what we see with IOT relates to home related gadgets and toys that connect to the internet. This is not the development I see focus around this year. Development will occur around the practical business use cases where this technology can better serve the enterprise to improve both our daily workflows, and our customers.” -Theresa Miller, Founder, 24×7 IT Connection
Cloud – Containers, Public Cloud, Private Cloud
“2017 will be the year that we all realize that containers, public cloud, and private cloud are landing in real environments. This is where some of the hype-cycle infrastructure platforms make the turn towards bringing late adopters on board. With Microsoft delivering Azure Stack, OpenStack making more inroads into stability and upgradeability, and with VMware preparing for their move into the next generation attempt at a private cloud, we are going to see lots of changes. The reality of many organizations is that multi-hypervisor, VMs and containers, and multi-cloud has gone from being laughed off to becoming part of the roadmap. The world isn’t all going to AWS, but we are all starting to see why we need to up our game and deliver customer-centric IT services across the board or else we risk watching Amazon siphon all of the workloads.” -Eric Wright, Principal Solutions Engineer, Technology Evangelist at Turbonomic
Applications are King
IT is quickly moving to an app-centric world. The CIO’s SLA to the CIO is not about hardware, or cloud, or infrastructure uptime, instead, the focus is performance (expressed in terms of end user experience) and efficiency (resource optimization). The implication is that teams need to be aligned behind application metrics, and operation teams need application-centric views of their environment as well as the complete set infrastructure that supports it (and their interdependencies). This can be a powerful movement to improve collaboration and team alignment. – Gerardo Dada, VP, Product Marketing of Solarwinds
2017 will be the last year we spend money in our own datacenter// changing role of IT pro
“In 2017, cloud will continue to drive radical change across enterprise IT. Businesses will make even greater investments outside of their own data centers, particularly in ‘as-a-service’ computing. 2017 will be the last year we spend money in our own datacenter as we move applications to the public cloud. The cloud will also bring about significant change in the role of IT professionals – IT leaders with more general experience will create teams of people with specialized knowledge of key elements of IT infrastructure, such as storage and security.”- Ruben Spruijt, CTO of Atlantis Computing
Cloud
“Over the last few years we’ve seen previous predictions around increased public cloud adoption come to fruition, and we predict 2017 will be the year hybrid cloud asserts itself as the dominant cloud environment. Cloud spending will continue to be on the incline, and we believe a majority of that spend will go toward hybrid cloud infrastructures; this is proving to be the sweet spot for the enterprise. Organizations that have spent a lot of time and resources on their own data center are not likely to do away with it all overnight. Adopting a hybrid cloud environment allows for a transition to cloud in a way in which feels most comfortable; a gradual approach that can provide both immense cost savings as well as recovery benefits. Hybrid cloud allows for a variety of recovery options should the need arise, on-premises, public cloud or a little of both, which help companies be better prepared for a variety of disaster scenarios. Additionally, the perceived complication and expense of transitioning to cloud, that has previously held many IT organizations back, is now starting to whither. More and more companies are realizing that adopting a hybrid cloud approach, with the right partners in place, can actually be quite simple and affordable.” – Paul Zeiter, President, Zerto
Creative Failover Will Expand
“IT people are inherently experimental and creative folks. Thus, given a tool like rapid, reliable replication technologies, they’ll start using it for “off-label” things – like migrating to cloud, scalability-testing workloads, security-testing systems, or for continuity through upgrades and patches. We’ll see far greater experimentation and some incredible new use cases coming out of the technology community in the coming year.” – Justin Giardina, CTO, iland.
Cloud – Amazon
“The line between VMware and AWS blurs. With the announcement of VMware Cloud on AWS in 2016, we will see organizations begin adopt this model, and the two skillets begin to merge in architects and administrators.” -Melissa Palmer, Solutions Architect, VCDX #236
Cloud – SaaS, CaaS and Office 365
“In 2017 there is no doubt we will see a continued interest in SaaS solutions and a move to the cloud (a la Office 365 more than anything else – Google has dropped this ball). And we’ll see increased interest in IaaS with AWS and Azure (more so with storage/recovery in the cloud than VMs for legacy infrastructure on-prem that get moved to the cloud as a stop-gap, the price points are still too high for most). However, for 2017, I think containers and Containers-as-a-Service (CaaS) is an interesting space to watch. Containers are a huge topic being kicked around these days with support in Windows Server 2016 being a top 10 feature on most people’s radars. And yet I think most people really have no idea what containers are (despite knowing words like Dockers and Kubernetes). It’s a hot topic going forward with CaaS being even hotter (note the support in Azure: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/container-service/) So I see a future where IaaS VMs becomes less important and CaaS (a subset of IaaS) becomes more important. CaaS and SaaS will be the biggest talk of 2017.” -J. Peter Bruzzese, Office Servers and Services MVP, www.conversationalgeek.com
Hybrid Cloud vs Public Cloud, File/Sync/Share and “Data Center on the Go”
“Towards the end of 2016 we heard that vSphere-based cloud services will run on AWS in 2017, a move that shows the major players are preparing to accommodate customers in a hybrid cloud environment. No matter how far we look into the future, there will always be data too sensitive to trust to public cloud services. So while some companies will create a hybrid cloud strategy, and some may go all private, most companies, especially larger ones, will not risk their data to a 100% public cloud strategy. So what of file sync and share? Today’s NAS storage solutions have not kept up with the times, creating a gap between the worlds of the data center and the connected mobile user. 2017 will see forward thinking companies not just creating secure file sync and share capability, but intertwining them with the company’s storage environment to avoid damaging or duplicating files. In essence, next year we will see the delivery of the data center on the go.” Geoff Barrall, CTO, Nexsan.
IoT
“The Internet of Things (IoT) is widely acknowledged as a big growth area for 2017. More connected devices will create more data, which has to be securely shared, stored, managed and analyzed. As a result, databases will become more complex and the management burden will increase. Those organizations which can most effectively monitor their database layer to optimize peak performance and resolve bottlenecks will be more strongly placed in a better position to exploit the opportunities the IoT will bring.” – Mike Kelly, CTO of Blue Medora