Cloud computing is married with children and faces new challenges as it matures

As the use of cloud computing continues to mature and become more strategic in nature, the market in cloud computing will change in 2019 and beyond. This change will impact every aspect of cloud computing, Ovum has identified five key trends in 2019 worthy of particular attention. Organizations should ensure these trends are considered when looking for Hybrid Cloud Platforms to future-proof their investments as well as consider the criteria evaluated in the Ovum Decision Matrix (ODM) for:

1.    The move to the edge, this shift to move compute and storage close to the source or retain it in a certain geography for data sovereignty reasons, will evolve in 2019. How these edge data centers are configured, owned, and managed will be the outcome of the debate in 2019. Ovum considers that the most likely outcome is many remote edge data centers will be extensions of larger regional and core public clouds, making a three-tier cloud model.  However, for certain specific scenarios these edge sites will be an extension of the corporate data center.

2.    The continued strategic use of cloud computing by enterprise organizations, with particular attention being paid to where workloads are best suited to run. The workload placement and optimization segment of the market will see a significant increase in 2019. This increase will be driven by organizations looking for cloud monitoring and management tools to help ensure that the use of cloud computing is delivering an effective and efficient service.

3.    With the cloud becoming more strategic, the types of workloads moving to the cloud will change. Organizations will accelerate the movement of business- and mission-critical core workloads to cloud environments. In 2019 the criteria used by organizations will harden as they look for newer capabilities, more aligned with the requirements of running mission-critical workloads. In other words, enterprise-grade clouds will emerge as the 2019 buzz-word.

4.    The migration of workloads to the cloud will create the conditions for an acceleration of the adoption of a DevOps process. This migration in 2019 will challenge DevOps particularly as operationalizing cloud-native applications will create new areas of collaboration that require new processes.

5.    Finally, in 2019 the cloud market will show greater signs of the separation into a handful of global mega cloud providers and plethora of smaller regional cloud providers will become even more apparent.

Ovum considers that 2019 – 20 will be pivotal years for the maturity and expansion of cloud computing. The rise of cloud native applications designed for multi-cloud environments, that include simple open integration and make workloads portable, will begin to change the way organizations value IT within the business.

The shift from a dominant VM-based world to a more mixed cloud native and VM-based world is the new reality. Over the next five years the dominance of VMs will be eroded as more workloads are developed and deployed in a container-based environment. While Ovum does not believe that all workloads will become container-based, we expect it to represent a significant proportion of the workloads by 2023. However, this shift requires an equally big cultural and skills shift to occur, and this is one of the resistant forces holding back faster adoption of containers, the other resistant force being the difficulty in modernizing legacy systems. The developer community has been quick to see the potential of containers and have embraced the technology; while IT operations are only just beginning to discover the potential benefits cloud native workload management can bring. 

Operational management of a container-based environment is fundamentally different to that currently deployed for a VM environment, and this means that not only do the roles and responsibilities need to change, but the tools and wider eco-system need to evolve to support it, thereby becoming more of a DevOps approach. The transition to the new structures and work practices required will take time to become ingrained in organizational culture, but platforms that can help with the management of container-based environments will accelerate this migration. Ovum expects these platform approaches to proliferate over the next few years and will increasingly become more comprehensive in terms of the capabilities offered.

Platform 9 have developed an open and vendor agnostic approach to dealing with the complexities of managing a multi-cloud environment. Ovum particularly like Platform 9’s capabilities for supporting both cloud native and legacy workload management. This hybrid approach to cloud workloads is going to be a reality for many organizations for the next five to ten years. The other key observation of Platform 9 is it supports the most popular tools for containers and serverless computing, and builds on these to make management a simple and consistent exercise from an operations perspective.