“The public cloud computing market will reach almost $70 billion by the end of 2015, with the top 5 verticals (discrete manufacturing, banking, professional services, process manufacturing, and retail) accounting for approximately 45% of the total spend for the market,” said International Data Corporation (IDC) in a recent report. “As one of the substantial transformative forces, cloud computing is impacting all areas of IT supply, composition, and consumption and provides the basis for many of the big data, mobile, and social solutions.”
Having been involved in the computer industry for nearly two decades, first as an IT service provider and now as a developer of cloud-enabling software solutions, IndependenceIT CTO and co-founder, Charles Buck, is revealing what he sees as the logical evolution in how IT will be deployed by organizations to accommodate business requirements. According to Mr. Buck, “There are several widely observed drivers behind emerging IT deployment behaviors that are leading to greater efficiency and access at a reduced cost. These are highlighted here to provide perspective on the market and how it is expected to evolve.”
According to Mr. Buck, five key business computing behaviors expected to shift IT buying patterns in 2016 include:
• Growing organizational adoption of public cloud infrastructure: As the mechanism to deliver basic application services, IT administrators will continue their upward adoption of cloud-based applications and data services. Improvements in security and performance combined with a significant reduction in cost are reducing on-premise software considerations.
• Movement toward unified logical data centers: The hybrid data center will be one of the topics of discussion in 2016 as IT administrators look for easier ways to deploy application workloads. A unified logical data center may span multiple cloud or physical data centers so that all services may be taken advantage of without regional limitations. Organizations that deploy/consumer solutions in a hybrid data center environment do so to increase business agility and financial savings.
• Greater preference toward client/server business applications that interface with Software-as-a-Service applications: There will be an increase in the use of client/server business applications with SaaS applications to create a more integrated user experience that is flexible and economical for specific business units or entire organizations.
• Transition to Infrastructure-as-a-Service as Costs Fall: There will be a reduction in the cost of appliances, servers, storage, routers and other components that are bought at scale by Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers, helping to drive down costs. This will make IaaS a more compelling option compared to internally managed infrastructure and lead to further customer migration. This is complemented by hyperconverged infrastructure and the fact IaaS providers will increasingly deploy these highly efficient solutions to centralize multiple technologies under a single management window.
• Further acceptance of BYOD: More employers are realizing the benefits of allowing employees to use their own hardware rather than dictating which computing platforms to standardize on. Additionally, business applications are now being made more accessible on these mobile devices, increasing their business enablement value.
“Industry-specific applications will be a driving force as well as businesses look for solutions that can be easily configured to their unique business and vertical requirements. With the huge increase in the number and diversity of services available in the market, organizations across industries will shift steadily toward cloud-first strategies to enable digital transformation,” noted IDC analysts.
“Business is undoubtedly transitioning to the cloud as we have seen on a daily basis. Whether it is on an application by application basis or organizations going ‘all-in,’ the transition is undeniable. The availability of cloud-based IT workspaces is further supporting this by helping organizations in every vertical move their on-premise workloads to the cloud,” said Seth Bostock, CEO, IndependenceIT. “What will be critical to accelerating this trend will be higher levels of workspace automation. Up until a few years ago, it had been the missing link to cloud enablement. However, its pervasiveness now paves the path toward worldwide adoption.”
