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Friday, January 04, 2019

Five top cloud predictions for 2019

By Nick Flaherty www.flaherty.co.uk

Jerry Melnick, CEO of SIOS Technology, has identified five major trends for 2019 in cloud technology.

1. The cloud is more suitable for critical applications

With IT staff now becoming more comfortable with the cloud for critical applications, their concerns about security and reliability, especially for five-9’s of uptime, have diminished substantially. Initially, organisations will prefer to use whatever high availability failover clustering technology they currently use in their data centres to protect critical applications being migrated to the cloud. This clustering technology will also be adapted and optimised for enhanced operations in the cloud. At the same time, cloud service providers will continue to advance their ability to provide higher service levels, leading to the cloud ultimately becoming the preferred platform for all enterprise applications.

2. Dynamic utilisation will drive migration to the cloud

With its virtually unlimited resources spread around the globe, the cloud is the ideal platform for delivering high uptime. But provisioning standby resources that sit idle most of the time has been cost-prohibitive for many applications. The increasing sophistication of fluid cloud resources deployed across multiple zones and regions, all connected via high-quality internetworking, now enables standby resources to be allocated dynamically only when needed, which will dramatically lower the cost of provisioning high availability and disaster recovery protections.

3. A preferred platform for SAP deployments

As the platforms offered by cloud service providers continue to mature, their ability to host SAP applications will become commercially viable and, therefore, strategically important. For CSPs, SAP hosting will be a way to secure long-term engagements with enterprise customers. For the enterprise, “SAP-as-a-Service” will be a way to take full advantage of the enormous economies of scale in the cloud without sacrificing performance or availability.

4. “Quick-start” templates will become the standard for complex software and service deployments

Quick-start templates are wizard-based interfaces that employ automated scripts to dynamically provision, configure and orchestrate the resources and services needed to run specific applications. Among their key benefits are reduced training requirements, improved speed and accuracy, and the ability to minimise or even eliminate human error as a major source of problems. By making deployments more turnkey, quick-start templates will substantially decrease the time and effort it takes for DevOps staff to setup, test and roll out dependable configurations.

5. Advanced analytics and AI will be everywhere

Advanced analytics and artificial intelligence will simplify IT operations, improve infrastructure and application robustness, and lower overall costs. Along with this trend, AI and analytics will become embedded in high availability and disaster recovery solutions, as well as cloud service provider offerings to improve service levels. With the ability to quickly, automatically and accurately understand issues and diagnose problems across complex configurations, the reliability, and thus the availability, of critical services delivered from the cloud will vastly improve.

“2019 is set to be an exciting year for the cloud with new capabilities and enhancements further driving migration to the cloud," said Melnick. "With these new improvements, built atop an already-solid foundation, the cloud may well achieve that long-anticipated tipping point where it becomes the preferred platform for a majority of enterprise applications for a majority of organisations.”

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