As CIOs continue to be pulled in different directions by employees, cloud providers and customers, organisations are beginning to realise that a single cloud strategy is no long longer sufficient in meeting a variety of needs. We can expect this trend to continue into 2015, with more companies opting for a cloud strategy that provides them with the ability to provide hybrid cloud services as part of a properly managed and governed IT portfolio.
Shadow IT will overtake traditional IT, forcing organisations to embrace hybrid cloud
As employees continue to bring their own devices into the enterprise environment and use cloud services outside of the jurisdiction of IT, we can expect shadow IT to continue to rise above traditional IT. Rather than the traditional approach of ‘shut it down’, organisations will be forced to embrace it and instead find ways to control it, or risk finding themselves increasingly marginalised within the organisation. First, they'll need to find where shadow IT exists, so we expect to see an increase in the creation and adoption of audit tools to support this.
Growth in hybrid cloud management platforms as CIOs seek to improve governance and compliance
As CIOs are increasingly pulled in different directions by both cloud hosting providers and employees, they’ll have to make a choice on whether to fight or embrace hybrid cloud in order to maintain IT governance over business data and to deliver compliance to their organisations. However, with the task of fighting hybrid cloud becoming increasingly difficult, we can expect to see a significant increase in the rise of companies embracing hybrid cloud management platforms in 2015.
The hidden glut of infrastructure capacity will drive down cloud prices and increase adoption
Organisations have still yet to migrate their business-critical workloads to the cloud and, with trust in the cloud still at a low, this is not going to change in 2015. As a result, we can expect to see the emergence of a hidden glut of infrastructure in the cloud, which in turn will drive down prices. On the flip side, this is likely to be the much needed catalyst for the bulk migration of mission critical on premise workloads to the cloud.
Docker will make inroads within organisations
In 2015 we’ll see container technologies, such as Docker, start making in-roads within enterprises and service provides. We can expect to see companies start using these technologies for real, genuine production workloads, due to the cost and efficiency gains such technology offers over traditional hypervisors. The hypervisor itself will not die, but we’ll see a rise in the number of people using both within an enterprise environment, managed by a central management system.
