This week, we offer some of the best cloud insights we’ve learned from trusted sources. Read how to choose the best cloud for your app, learn about Verizon’s new cloud services path or how continued security concerns still plague the cloud.
How to choose the best cloud for your app
How should I match the applications in my portfolio with the most appropriate cloud? This question is becoming increasingly common in enterprise IT organizations today, and it can be difficult to answer. Often the decision depends on the sensitivity of the data within the application. At other times, public versus private cloud considerations are paramount. Other factors influencing the decision include business goals and whether or not speed or price must be optimized. Read the article at InfoWorld.
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We asked our in-house Flexiant cloud experts what they expect to see from cloud computing in 2016. Here are some of our thoughts.
1. Containers become mainstream
In 2016, enterprises will embrace containers and start shifting production workloads onto them. They’ll also start more projects to “containerize” their legacy apps with similar enthusiasm as when they visualized their legacy apps from bare metal.
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The market for cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is in a state of upheaval, as many service providers are shifting their strategies after failing to gain enough market traction, according to Gartner. Global spending on IaaS is expected to reach almost US$16.5 billion in 2015, an increase of 32.8 percent from 2014, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2014 to 2019 forecast at 29.1 percent, according to Gartner’s latest forecast.
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At a recent conference Asher Baig, of GigaOm categorically stated that cloud is indeed now mainstream. I still think it is getting there for many use cases but that very soon the human change and adoption process will have accelerated and cloud consumption will be commonplace. 
It’s interesting to take a step back and look at the Internet. As Jeff Vance states, “Back in the mid-90s, the Internet was borderline useless for most people. There were no decent search engines, just aggregators that sorted popular sites into major categories like “sports” or “news,” and no decent mail clients, just so-so services from the likes of AOL and Prodigy.”
Cloud when first introduced was a bit like that as well. You had access to some hardware, but someone was handling it elsewhere. With some manual planning, some back and forth, you could actually get the resources you needed for a website launch (although this might have taken a few months). But that’s all changed – now you provision and de-provision, scale up and scale down all through one user interface whatever compute, storage or network resources you need – with a credit card.
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It is increasingly accepted that at least some of an enterprise’s applications can benefit from residing in the public cloud. For cloud service providers, many of your customers will already understand this, and may well be open to cloud computing as an idea – organizations under pressure to move to an Opex, rather than Capex cost model, or those growing faster than capital investment budget can allow, are strong contenders.
They may however be at a loss as to where to start. Should all applications be migrated to the cloud, or only some? In which order should the applications be moved? Also, implementing any new concept within a business carries an element of risk – how best to ensure that any such risk is planned for and mitigated?
It is one thing to appreciate something as an academic idea, one that analysts and journalists will continue to discuss at length for the foreseeable future – quite another to take the plunge and apply this to a customer’s own business. If your customer views cloud as a long term strategy, you will need to ensure a positive first impression, therefore these early stages are key.
Consider where your customers’ existing applications would sit on the differentiation spectrum: at the left end would be their most commoditized applications, e.g. web, collaboration applications etc.; at the right would be their most highly differentiated, business critical ones, such as legacy, bespoke applications or those most affected by local compliance regulations. Generally speaking, a left to right approach makes most sense, i.e. proving the cloud computing concept for your organization with lower risk, more standardized applications, eventually moving to the more critical ones when it makes sense to do so. Left-of-spectrum applications with highly fluctuating demand are particularly good candidates.
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