How Far Has the Cloud Industry Really Come in 2017?

With data growth showing no signs of slowing down and the variety of cloud migration solutions on the market, there continues to be a large amount of end-user confusion when it comes to how best to address their cloud migration options. Now at the end of 2017 George, COO Sureline Systems, reviews the top five industry analyst predictions to see how far the market has actually evolved in 2017 and where it might be heading in 2018.

1. Chinese firms will be the key drivers of the global cloud evolution George’s Perspective: There has been significant growth in the Chinese public cloud market in 2017. There is significant competition, but it is not impacting the global market yet. Most of the growth has been domestic and we are just starting to see growth outside of China.
2.  Lift-and-shift tools will improve and make cloud migration easier George’s Perspective: The lift-and-shift migration tools continue to evolve and improve. There continues to be greater ease of use, and the number of complementary technologies for scoping and workload assessment are making planning easier.
3. Hybrid cloud networking will remain the weak link in hybrid cloud George’s Perspective: Networking will be a weak link in both hybrid cloud and cloud migration for years to come. But it is not necessarily the weakest link. Each operating system vendor is working a hybrid cloud strategy and all of them are at different stages, and in most cases, they are public cloud specific, thus not allowing for a multi-cloud strategy.
4. By 2018, the cloud will be a preferred delivery mechanism for analytics, increasing public data consumption by 150% and paving the way for thousands of new industry applications George’s Perspective: I don’t believe the public cloud has become the preferred delivery mechanism for analytics yet, but it is well on its way. There is no doubt that public cloud data consumption has increased by at least 150%, and that is just a start.
5. More than 85% of enterprise it organizations will commit to multi-cloud architectures by 2018, driving up the rate and pace of change in it organizations George’s Perspective: Multi-cloud is becoming an imperative for enterprises. It will take a study to determine if it has reached 85% of these enterprises actually being committed to a multi-cloud strategy today, but it is clear that organizations are exploring what it takes to be multi-cloud ready.