Always-On in 2018 – The True Power of Multiple Clouds

Always-On
in 2018 – The True Power of Multiple Clouds
Asanga Wanigatunga, Senior
Director, Cloud Group, APJ, Veeam Software

2018 is here, and with it greater expectations, fresh
challenges and bigger deliverables to meet.

As the everyday enterprise slowly but surely becomes known
for the digital services that it provides, any downtime – no matter how short –
is no longer an option. 100% availability is essential
in keeping customers happy in this Always-On digital world. Data will
become a prime asset for the enterprise, and its explosive growth over the next
few years will only cement its importance.

There is universal recognition in the benefits of adopting
cloud strategies – no matter your preference for hybrid, private, or public.
With the popularity of the cloud accelerating dramatically, more applications
will be built specifically for the platform, making cloud more scalable and
leading to the rise in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Here are some other trends
that we think will shape the coming year:

The impending shift of assets to the cloud is no longer an
“if” – rather a “when” and “how”. No single cloud platform is perfect for every
workload, but cloud’s biggest advantage is its ability to allow you to scale
and customise exactly what your enterprise needs. And as demand grows, the
tools and platforms will continue to mature and drive to more seamless
integration across clouds.

One thing that’s clear from the many natural disasters
that happened in 2017 is that a single
data center design is insufficient. But running active-active
configurations across multiple data centers is simply too costly, so we foresee
that 2018 will see an exponential growth of replication to the cloud for the
purposes of failover.

2018 will see significant one-way migration towards cloud
in one specific area – Software as a Service. The
simplicity of SaaS services such as corporate email
systems, collaboration, HR, CRM, and payroll will lead
to a one-way cloud migration.

As cloud
matures, the cost, scale and efficiency benefits of cloud-native applications
are now too compelling to ignore, and it’s only a matter of time before the
technological advances propel these applications into the mainstream.

Hyper-scale, highly distributed, and mission-critical
applications will soon become reality, and further increase the demand for
infusing data and analytics into every application delivered in the cloud. Compelling
characteristics such as low-latency, scale out and geo-distribution will
provide the type of horsepower IOT and numerous other global scale applications
require. 

The pending the enforcement of the General Data Protection
Regulation (GDPR) and customer privacy concerns will raise the visibility and
focus on data ownership. Enterprises will not only be turning to any
availability solution, but to one that is safe and secure.

Data protection and data security have been a core focus
of every IT organization for the past several decades in an attempt to maintain
24.7.365 availability. In 2018, we will see increasing focus on how this same
data content can be turned into a business enablement asset. Simply put,
investigations into data use for development operations, patch testing,
analysis of data sets through machine learning and other emerging techniques.

While we aren’t quite
at the level of HAL from “2001: A Space Odyssey”, technologies like Alexa,
Cortana and Siri are already showing the impact that AI can bring to our
everyday life. For businesses, machine learning capabilities powered by
petabytes of data and insanely fast compute resources will impact consumer
experiences, biotech research, financial modeling and myriad other
applications. Key to this is letting AI take over the mundane tasks so that
existing specialist human teams can focus on other factors critical for
business growth and development. It’s only a matter of time before AI-enabled
through cloud platforms will begin permeating across enterprises, industries
and applications.

So what does this all mean for enterprises in the next 12
months – if a cyclone or storm, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack or
other major breach and a catastrophic regional power failure all strike at
once? Customers and users the world over won’t care what issues strike – they
expect the information and ability to transact to be there when they want it,
and it’s frighteningly easy for them to simply change their vendor and move to
the competitor.

Availability isn’t a choice, it’s a base requirement and the
time for it is now.