There are several trends in the cloud market that service providers and telcos must embrace; calling for an alignment of business strategy. Here are three of these trends:
Hybrid cloud
This approach means companies can pick and mix private and public clouds, place workloads in the cloud based on how well they fit, share workloads on multiple public clouds and scale up or down as needed. Our view is that hybrid cloud is a means to moving all workloads eventually to the cloud. You can see our thoughts here. Business Cloud News suggests that hybrid cloud has been held back to date, but that a “strong backing for open application programming interfaces (APIs) and multi-cloud orchestration platforms is making it far easier to integrate cloud services and on-premise workloads alike. As a result, we will continue to see hybrid cloud dominate the conversation.”
For service providers and telcos, adopting solutions that can clearly manage multiple clouds and orchestration across these is important. It also calls for positioning to be found against the giants of the industry – showcasing how and why your hybrid cloud solution is different.
Containers and Shifting Workloads
Cloud customers want ways to more easily move applications between clouds. Rather than be locked into a particular hypervisor environment such as VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V or Xen, containers provide a mechanism through which applications can be moved between cloud environments according to Cloud Computing Admin. Service providers must have options available to them to deliver container technology so that enterprises can embrace them and start shifting production workloads onto them. Customers will want to “containerize” their legacy apps with similar enthusiasm as when they visualized their legacy apps from bare metal.
Most of the development effort on software managing containers in 2016 will be spent on two things:
- Security of containers so they can be audited and verified that they have not been in no way altered or tampered
- Deployment tools which will integrate into IDE making deployment of code into a container as simple as one click
Finally, orchestration of containers will be a challenge. Solutions like Kubernetes, Docker, Swarm, and Nomad will compete and we’ll see an on-going battle to determine which will prevail. Solutions like Kubernetes Orchestration as a Service can help service providers.
Cloud Prices Drop, Disaster Recovery Services Increase
It’s predicted that cloud use for data resiliency and recovery services will increase over the next year. The reason is that prices continue to drop while cloud-powered on-demand usability suits backup and disaster recovery services.
Surprisingly, most businesses are way behind when it comes to having the proper levels of data protection, including in the critical areas of backup and disaster recovery (DR). According to IDC, 70% of organizations have insufficient DR protection of their critical data1. Meanwhile, according to Markets and Markets, the worldwide Data Protection & Disaster Recovery software market will grow to $7.9B by 20182.
For service providers, now is the time for backup and disaster recovery in the cloud. To do this requires an easy solution for customers to provision and configure Backup as a Service (BaaS) on their virtual servers through a single user interface with consolidated billing for a completely transparent experience. Learn more about backup as a service integration.
Cloud service providers and telcos must align their business strategy to deliver against the market trends. That calls for solutions that allow multi-cloud adoption and extensible orchestration solutions.
1 Complexity and Data Growth Driving Small and Medium-Sized Environments Toward a New Generation of Data Protection”, IDC, June 2014. Sample: 401 SMB Businesses, <1000 employees
2 WW Data Protection and Recovery Software Rev by Region, 2009-2018, IDC, May 2014
