The right tools to make the right decisions Part 2

Heads in the Clouds? Are You Going to Be All Talk or All Action? ..Getting the Most out of Your Existing Cloud

But supposing you’re one of the many that has made the leap and deployed some apps in the cloud. How will your organization continue to extract efficiencies for the long haul? It’s not just an arbitrage of computational horsepower, but a healthy mix of maximizing innovation with your existing suppliers and avoiding lock-in so that you can keep an eye on alternative solutions. The traditional techniques of dynamically matching your workload utilization (including bandwidth, clock, I/O, network speed, etc.) and requirements to suppliers, running different scenarios and constant ongoing measurement will remain in play in 2017 and beyond. And, data-driven decision making and project-managing the selection and mix of suppliers will remain critical to managing costs as this infrastructure footprint grows. But it’s more than that. The vertical solution stack in place at the suppliers start to matter more, and last but not least, how will they help you tame the migration and integration complexity beast. The firms providing the migration execution guidance in particular are limited and often require internal hand-holding.

New for 2017: Convergence of Conflicting Demands

When cloud computing was just for pilot projects, you could afford to min/max the solution for a specific outcome – lowest cost, fastest deployment, and so on. As we move into maturity in 2017, these factors will need to be balanced with enterprise-scale demands for security, compliance, integration, simplicity, serviceability, resiliency, and many others.

• Integration complexity will remain and will stare you in the face. And, as such, It will now become front and center of the challenges facing firms looking to migrate and evolve their footprint

• Managed services may be a mix from AWS and 3rd party firms. Firms may have the ability to mix and match up and down the chain of services if they so choose, and manage them seamlessly

• Customers will demand simplicity and flexibility at the same time, perhaps more loudly than before and as such, more of the technology supplier footprint will move “under the hood”

• There will be an increase in the implementation of hyperconverged software packages that would monitor all these environments – on-premise, major cloud providers and hybrid / private environment

• An evolution of suppliers beyond just trying to match workload requirements and utilization – with a focus on micro-level flexibility in provisioning as well as industry verticalized clouds, business process management and related security applications

What May Go Away

• Cloud Exchanges, set up for businesses to barter cloud capacity, may continue its start-and-stop approach. DBCE, the only worldwide platform on which IaaS resources such as CPU, storage and RAM could be compared, closed earlier this year.

• Generic smaller cloud service providers outside of the giants – they will get absorbed by others or naturally get verticalized (case in point: Cisco, Dell and others are closing down their public cloud capabilities). This will undoubtedly impact service terms and pricing.

2017 will continue to be an action-filled year. Regardless of whether you’re worried about lagging or squeezing the most out of the cutting edge, having the supporting intelligence on the market, your suppliers, their pricing and terms will ultimately continue to give you, the customer, the ability to drive market trends more than your suppliers. Organizations will continue to demand more efficiency, more flexibility and more agility at better pricing – and with the right data, that remains absolutely achievable.

Read: The right tools to make the right decisions Part 1