4 Predictions For The 2015 IT Market Space

For 2014, I predicted cloud market consolidation and recalibration; disaster recovery becoming the new normal for businesses instead of an afterthought; and the need for a major “bang” for vCloud (vCHS at the time) providers, possibly by taking on a large public application – and I wasn’t too far off.

As we’re gearing up for another exciting year in the cloud industry I wanted to share a few core ideas that I believe we’ll see take flight and takeover focus this year. I predict there will an evolution of cloud-native security, convergence of backups and recovery, an increased level of cloud integration, and the beginning of storage containers utilization. 

1. Convergence of Backups and Recovery. This year many companies started to modernize their disaster recovery approach using Recovery-as-a-Service. This was driven by the business expectation that your applications and data are accessible at all times, from anywhere, regardless of what happens in the world surrounding those applications. Evolution of recovery technology allow businesses of all sizes access to affordable, simple, Recovery-as-a-Service in the cloud which bring single applications back online in minutes and whole datacenters back on line nearly as quickly. What’s going to change in 2015, however, is how we look at recovery and the components that it involves.

Backups are always going to be a crucial component to protecting infrastructure because they provide long retention and off-site capabilities that recovery isn’t designed to accommodate for primarily. The goal of recovery services is to get your business back online and functioning as quickly as possible. The goal of backups is to protect your archive data and records in a safe and secure way.

What does this mean for SMBs in particular? It could mean elevating their game to better compete with larger enterprises who have less limited resources. Obtaining a new budget line item for recovery could be impossible, but achieving recovery with your backups by leveraging existing backups budget line items is now a possibility.

2. Cloud Native Security Evolution. One of the biggest changes I anticipate for 2015 is a new definition of what security looks like in the cloud. Typically security is handled as a complex, rigid component of your infrastructure, much like the network used to be. You limit your ability to grow and contract, as well as make on-a-dime changes, because security features are often clunking along behind your lightweight, flexible cloud environment. But we’re seeing a continued trend of requiring all components of cloud infrastructure be held to the same standard of flexibility, agility and on-demand decision-making, and most importantly, that it’s cloud-ready out of the box.

This new cloud-native option will require everyone to rethink security complexity and how to approach security, as well as how to spend your security time and resources. Increase security transparency makes auditing easier and provides better assurances.

When each part does its job without significant human interaction you lessen the likelihood of human error and increase the ability of your team to focus on the core business instead of the minute, time-consuming details of managing infrastructure. Cloud-native security has been a great idea for years, but I’m finally seeing technology that will actually work introduced in the market and I expect that will take off in a big way in 2015.

3. New level of cloud integration. Integration of security with the cloud, integration of backup and recovery technologies and increased reliance on cloud technologies by individual businesses all drive to a bigger theme I expect in the coming year – the increased capabilities and focus on cloud integration.

In recent months companies like EMC entered the cloud business and built cloud into their control panel, while brands like Veeam began to integrate with the cloud simply and effectively. More and more brands and products will begin to integrate cloud into existing tools and control panels with the ease and simplicity of a “cloud button” addition from the user-perspective. 

Whether or not it’s a conscious connection, the business world is taking integration cues from the consumer world and their expectations. What this cloud integration is heading towards is an “iCloud-level” of integration for the enterprise. Individual businesspersons have come to expect that level of integration from their consumer products, and that expectation is rolling into the business world as well. Much as security is becoming cloud-native, everything else is rolling in that direction as well.

4. Start planning for storage containers. By the end of 2015 you’ll be as sick of hearing the phrase ‘storage containers’ as you were of hearing the phrase ‘big data’ in years past. Why? Because this is the next big thing in cloud and it’s big enough that everyone will be, and should be, talking about it. Storage containers have the potential to disrupt everything about hybrid cloud, cloud portability and resource consumption. If you haven’t heard this phrase yet, it refers to products like Docker and CoreOS that are designed to self-contain individual applications and allows the containers to have their own APIs. The level of API integration is going to allow individuals to talk to the individual container, and tell the contents of the container what to do, for example, scan for particular data or mine configuration files, which will enable greater automation capabilities.

So far a number of mega clouds like Google, Azure and AWS have already announced their support of companies like Docker and that trend is expected to continue in 2015. What does this mean to you personally next year? If you’re a developer leveraging containers, you just gained quite a bit of flexibility and control for hosting your application in the future. If you’re a “do-it-yourself”-er, you need to start self-preparing for any impact this will have on your environment. Providers will be paying close attention to the stories and container developments this year and look for the impact to trickle through the market in the future.

Next year at this time I’ll be sitting down again to consider how my scorecard looks heading into 2016 and we’ll see how accurate my crystal ball was for 2015.