4 Predictions for the 2015 IT Market Space

Featured article by Pat O’Day, Chief Technology Officer, Bluelock

Now that cloud services have become part of IT’s “new normal”, commonly referred to as “Hybrid”, it seems obvious that the approaches and tools we use to manage IT would also evolve and mature, though the pace of evolution varies amongst companies, of course.  According to a Website Magazine article quoting a Gartner survey, more than 55% of CIOs indicate they would host all critical apps in the cloud by 2020. Cloud services use cases can vary greatly, but often hold common themes around converting traditional application to SaaS, or adding disaster recovery to your existing datacenter with RaaS.

As we’re gearing up for another exciting year in the cloud industry here are a few core ideas to keep an eye on as we head into 2015:

– 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.

We’re seeing both backup and recovery vendors integrate the two ideas as well, over the past year. Veeam has added cloud-native capabilities to its backup technology for DR, and Zerto has added backups to its cloud-based DR product for additional protection.

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.

– 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, often bolted-on or around applications after the fact. This 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. We’re also seeing a continued trend of requiring all components of an application be held to the same standard, regardless of how or where it’s hosted.

New platform-based security services like Illumio will require everyone to rethink security complexity and how to approach security. Taking an agent-based approach guarantees an out-of-the-box hybrid cloud capability, and a single dashboard to see the security across everything at once, be it private, public or on-prem, provides visibility and transparency at an application-level.

The benefits of this approach lead the users to accumulate data that can be leveraged to make the host profiling capabilities stronger over time, which provides a stickier element than traditional, isolated single-tenant products. You can also derive best practice templates and profiles from the data, which can be analyzed and integrated into future projects.

– OEMs add out-of-the-box 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 entered the market with products that have the ability to manage local and cloud simultaneously from the same interface, like EMC CloudArray and brands like Veeam Cloud Connect Version 8 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.

– Start planning for containers. By the end of 2015 you’ll clearly note hype around the phrase “containers,” just like we lived through big data hype. 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.

Containers have the potential to disrupt everything about hybrid cloud, cloud portability and resource consumption. If you haven’t heard this phrase yet, this is really an extension of the concept of a virtual container, for example, VMware’s virtual datacenter, or vApp, taken to a whole new level of programmability and portability. Containers refer 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 VMware vCloud Air, 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.

Pat O’Day, Chief Technology Officer, Bluelock

As Bluelock’s Chief Technology Officer, Pat is responsible for commercializing and making the company’s “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS) cloud computing model a business reality. With more than 15 years of experience as an information technology professional, he defines Bluelock’s services, spearheads its strategic vendor alliances and oversees the solution strategy.

After starting his career in network management and systems integration and then transitioning into managed IT services, data center outsourcing and disaster recovery, Pat is uniquely qualified to develop and continue to grow Bluelock’s innovative Virtual Datacenter services.

He is currently serving on the advisory council for the School of Information Technology at Harrison College as well as the CIO council for NPower Indiana.
He is also the co-founder and former president of the local Association of Internet Professionals, a former board member of the technology peer group for TechPoint, Indiana’s only statewide information technology association and has served on the board of Directors for both the Zionsville Boys and Girls Club and NPower Indiana.