Five Trends Prove There’s No Need to Protest Moving Mission-Critical Data into the Cloud
Farmington Hills, MI (PRWEB) November 01, 2011
“The cloud has become an expectation moreso than a novelty in IT today, so it’s not surprising that discussions among top IT pros are taking a new turn, focusing on the type of cloud solution that can be of most benefit to a company, the best ways to deploy a cloud strategy and the kinds of value-added services that can be bundled with that cloud offering,” says Vince DeLuca, COO, Logicalis.
Such discussions have led to a series of emerging trends that bear further scrutiny by the entire cloud community – vendors and users alike. To help clients quickly identify important topics for discussion in the cloud, Logicalis has compiled a list of five trends that prove there’s no reason to protest moving mission-critical data into the cloud any longer.
Five Emerging Cloud Trends
1. Private cloud deployment is fast and furious. There has been a rapid rise in private cloud adoption among large enterprises. This isn’t really a surprise as there are a fairly robust set of infrastructures and applications that enterprise IT staff manage and they want to take advantage of the tools and technologies available in the private cloud space – such as multi-tenancy, service automation and self service portals. IT staffs think in terms of three core capabilities or “services stacks” that cloud computing can provide their organizations: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and the familiar Software as a Service (SaaS). Private Clouds provide a framework to streamline the delivery of these IT services to internal customers, enabling business agility while reducing cost.
2. The hybrid cloud is here to stay. Across all sectors in both large and mid-size enterprises, it’s clear that the hybrid cloud computing model – linking an internal, premises-based private cloud with the capabilities and bandwidth of public clouds – is here to stay. Companies are looking at application stratification when making decisions. Certain types of CRM, collaboration and messaging applications are seen as appropriate for public clouds, while applications with more sensitive or private information – such as those with industry or government compliance requirements – are being architected to reside within private infrastructures or application spaces that exist within the four walls of the enterprise. “We can appreciate that separation and the reasons for it,” DeLuca says. “The Logicalis Enterprise Cloud offers a shared, multi-tenancy environment that enables us to consult and build a roadmap for our customers. We leverage ITSM and business processes to allow customers to take their existing private cloud infrastructure and build a blueprint that addresses application cloud awareness, connectivity, and security in building one’s hybrid cloud strategy.”
3. Consolidation is inevitable. Every technology and industry has gone through cycles of consolidation and while the trend isn’t new, it seems to be one that is gaining traction in the cloud. Customers are seeking to deploy applications in different ways creating demand for consolidation of the cloud delivery models – IaaS, PaaS and SaaS – in the form of a unified stack as a service delivery model. This may be a harbinger of consolidation of cloud service providers as well, in order to provide greater economies of scale to customers. Today a provider may be focused on infrastructure, but with no linkage to the applications. Or a provider may be focused on software, but with no capabilities to manage their cloud-based infrastructure. There is a customer requirement for these capabilities going forward and an effort needs to be made to consolidate infrastructure and platform, bridging these two areas where integration makes the most sense. Doing so allows customers to take advantage of an elastic infrastructure with platform hooks for building and running custom applications.
4. Application-specific cloud communities are forming. In public space in particular, discussions around application-specific cloud communities are on the rise, particularly so in three central areas:
- Application Performance Communities – These are communities formed around the capabilities of specific processor platforms, such as Intel-based platforms and Unix-based platforms, which handle application workloads differently.
- Regulatory Communities – These are communities formed around the requirements of specific regulations and compliances, such as HIPAA in healthcare.
- Location-Based Services Communities – While the cloud is location independent, there are often many requirements and regulations to protect data that affect where it is located geographically. Multi-national companies may find that it makes sense for specific data to reside within a specific geography, for example.
5. Managed Services get a cloud twist. Cloud computing has refueled interest in “outsourcing” tasks and organizations are again looking to managed services as they reassess their resource strategies. They are not focused on the ability to utilize a virtual machine, but are focused on the management of infrastructure and taking advantage of the services that cloud computing offers. So, the cloud has become the trigger for discussion and a renewed interest and demand for managed services.
Want to learn more?
Logicalis recently analyzed more than 35,000 online forum and social media posts by CIOs and CTOs and found that the overwhelming majority of their cloud comments were positive, outweighing negative comments 23:1. Want to know more? See Is the Cloud Living Up to CIO Expectations?
What is Cloud Computing? Find out all about public, private and hybrid options.
What are the five common mistakes companies make most often in their cloud strategies?
About Logicalis
Logicalis is an international provider of integrated information and communications technology (ICT) solutions and services founded on a superior breadth of knowledge and expertise in communications & collaboration, data center, and cloud computing and managed services.
Logicalis Group employs nearly 2,500 people worldwide, including highly trained service specialists who design, specify, deploy and manage complex ICT infrastructures to meet the needs of over 6,000 corporate and public sector customers. To achieve this, Logicalis maintains strong partnerships with technology leaders such as Cisco, HP, IBM and Microsoft.
The Logicalis Group has annualized revenues of over $1 billion, from operations in the UK, US, Germany, South America and Asia Pacific, and is fast establishing itself as one of the leading IT and Communications solution integrators, specializing in the areas of advanced technologies and services.
The Logicalis Group is a division of Datatec Limited, listed on the Johannesburg and London AIM Stock Exchanges, with revenues of approximately $5 billion.
For more information, visit http://www.us.logicalis.com .
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Courtney Cooper
Logicalis
614-291-8456
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