Five Trends Prove There’s No Need to Protest Moving
Mission-Critical Data into the Cloud
Farmington Hills,
MI, November 1, 2011 – The “Occupy” movement and the
impact of cloud computing are both gaining significant traction
worldwide, albeit for different reasons, says Logicalis, an
international provider of integrated information and communications
technology (ICT) solutions and services (http://www.us.logicalis.com/).
Politics aside, Logicalis says CIOs and CTOs are becoming so
comfortable with the cloud that some important trends are emerging
with respect to CIOs’ cloud usage.
“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 here.
- What are the five common mistakes companies
make most often in their cloud strategies? Find out
here.
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/.