In January of 2015, Cloud Sherpas, which offers cloud advisory and technology services, offered up predictions of what to expect in the coming year.
David Hoff, CTO and co-founder of Cloud Sherpas looked back on his predictions to see how closely the prediction matched to reality.
He did not predict that the company would be acquired by Accenture in September.
1. Analytics will become the cornerstone of digital applications
Hoff made this prediction and for the most part he is right. The use of analytics is growing and there is more demand from customers for this, which is highlighted by companies like analytics and others putting a greater emphasis on analytics in their platforms.
Hoff, said: "A look at how each of the major cloud platform providers has created offerings and services focused on these use cases suggests that this is and will continue to become a vitally important part of enterprise applications."
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2. Enterprises will begin large scale migrations to cloud infrastructure
The reality is that there has been some big moves to the cloud, GE moved 9,000 applications and 300 ERP systems to AWS, while Capital One has begun developing and testing operations in the cloud and plans to shrink its data centre footprint to three from eight by the end of 2018.
It’s hard to tell how many enterprises are conducting large scale migrations to cloud infrastructure, mostly because many don’t like to reveal it.
In July, Amazon reported the AWS cloud revenue of $1.82bn and has passed 1 million customers, suggesting that more enterprises are going into the cloud.
3. Security issues will slow the Internet of Things
Security isn’t currently the biggest issue for IoT projects, although it may soon be. The bigger limitations are around platform and scale.
However, because IoT is still in its infancy and work has been focused on building IoT platforms, scale and security are still areas that truly need to be tackled.
4. Containerisation will effectively eliminate PaaS
Containers have certainly been a big talking point this year. Docker and Kubernetes have been one of the central topics at the majority of tech conferences this year that I’ve attended.
Hoff said: "If we look at service offerings launches as a proxy for demand, there were far more Docker and Containerization services launches in 2015 than PaaS services launches.
"Existing PaaS services will continue to mature, but I believe container-based architectures will continue to have significantly higher growth rates."
5. Organisations will realise the cloud provides more robust and sophisticated security and compliance controls
Hoff said: "This assertion is much harder to gauge; however, if we look back though the biggest security breaches of 2015, the vast majority did not involve public cloud services."
As covered in point two, more organisations appear to be moving to the cloud; this has included more regulated industries such as finance.
These migrations are also including more sensitive data moving into cloud-based services, suggesting that more trust is being placed in the security of it.
