2014 Predictions: Riverbed’s view

Continuing CSW’s coverage of predictions of what industry figures see coming down the road for cloud services in 2014. This time the predictions come from Paul Coates, Regional Vice President, UK and South Africa at Riverbed.

In 2014 he expects to see four key trends having an impact on businesses.

The first on his list is the fading of single cloud strategies. He sees companies increasingly automating the shifting of workloads from one cloud service to another in order to achieve optimum performance, price and availability.  Businesses are beginning to realise that having a single venue for computing leaves them exposed to risks from an availability and performance perspective, so in 2014, he sees companies move away from a single cloud strategy towards a multi-cloud strategy approach.

In practice, what he sees is the acceptance of using the appropriate service provider for major business tasks. For example, this might be the sales organisation using Salesforce, and the HR department using an e-HR SaaS based service, while in-house applications might be hosted on a private cloud. It will no longer be about one big solution, but about picking and choosing what works for the individual business.

The second is Software Defined Everything. Software Defined Networks are already proving their worth to a number of organisations running very large networks, with the virtualisation of the network following the lead of the virtualisation of servers and desktop PCs. In 2014, he sees organisations finally implementing software-defined architectures to achieve continued flexibility and control.

In particular he expects individual terms like software defined networking and software defined storage to give way to larger concepts around the software defined data centre (SDDC) and software defined branch. Whilst, a true SDDC will be some distance off for many businesses, over the next 12 months businesses will need to adopt the right infrastructure elements early, and begin to implement virtualisation and SDN to help them progress toward a fully virtualised data centre.

Third on his list is the way consumerisation is shifting power from the IT organisation to the users, whether that’s employees or customers. As the power of the individual and user expectations continue to grow, IT organisations will have to adapt to their users.  In 2014, IT organisations will respond by implementing metrics and measuring the satisfaction of their users. So, he expects tried-and-true concepts like Net Promoter Score to become a mainstay in how IT evaluates its overall effectiveness.

Last on his list is Big Data, which he sees becoming even bigger during the coming year, driven largely by the growth of `Internet of Things’. However, as everything becomes driven by IP addresses and the amount of data generated continues to grow, he sees this putting unprecedented pressure on storage strategies and technologies.

As a result, over the next year expects to see two things happening. Firstly, in-house companies will need to move towards a combination of robust storage hardware and software that allows for quick access to relevant information. Secondly, as data storage needs increase, more companies will turn to private cloud storage.