Hybrid cloud reigns in 2019

Cloud adoption continues to be in a state of flux. There are companies which have barely gone onto the cloud, and others managing multiple cloud platforms. What is clear is that moving some or all of operations to the cloud is definitely becoming the norm.

Source: Red Hat. Dawson.

Red Hat's recent Global Customer Tech Outlook survey* has shown that it's a hybrid cloud world. The survey found that 6% of companies that responded have a pure public cloud strategy, while more than 20% of the respondents are still establishing their cloud strategy.

“This is consistent with what we’ve seen in years past. Developing and implementing a clear cloud strategy is hard, and with new technologies and challenges entering the market every day, enterprises are trying to keep up.

"Most organisations are pursuing a hybrid cloud strategy, with private and public cloud playing a role together and separately depending on the workload,” said Margaret Dawson, VP, Portfolio Product Marketing at Red Hat in a blog post.

Red Hat's survey found that 30% of respondents have a hybrid cloud strategy, with 45% of respondents using two or more cloud platforms and 65% planning to use two or more within the next 12 to 24 months.

“Only 11% do not plan to use a cloud platform within the next two years. Seven percent of the respondents are planning to use five—or more—cloud platforms within the next two years. From our perspective, it is, and we expect it will be a hybrid, multicloud world for many years to come,” she said.

Source: Puppet. McKinnon.

Other industry observers agree that companies prefer a multicloud world. “Companies in Asia Pacific and Japan know they need to adopt cloud-native architectures and delivery workflows because that’s where the world is headed, but many businesses are not ready to go all-in on the cloud yet.

"While it took 10 years for virtualisation to become ubiquitous, cloud-native will become the default way to build, deploy and run both applications and infrastructure in less than half of that time. The changes associated with adopting cloud-native technologies and workflows are even more impactful than virtualisation. In 2019, companies will be ready for this shift - though this should be addressed in an incremental manner,” said Darryl McKinnon, VP and MD, Asia Pacific & Japan, Puppet.

Source: Veeam. McLagan.

“With companies operating across borders and the reliance on technology growing more prominent than ever, an expansion in multicloud usage is almost inevitable,” said Shaun McLagan, Senior VP, Asia Pacific and Japan at Veeam Software.

“On-premises data and applications will not become obsolete, but the deployment models for your data will expand with an increasing mix of on-prem, software-as-a-service (SaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), managed clouds and private clouds.

“Over time, we expect more of the workload to shift off-premises, but this transition will take place over years, and we believe that it is important to be ready to meet this new reality today.”

Source: Commvault.
Lim.

Gary Lim, Director, Systems Engineering, Commvault, also thinks multicloud is the way to go.  He said, “Multicloud management will be the choice solution, providing capabilities to run multiple accounts from a single cloud provider using one solution. Organisations who moved data and workloads to the cloud last year and disconnected from on-premise servers are making a return with more zeal in having control over their data.”

Stephen McNulty, President, Asia Pacific and Japan, Micro Focus said cloud strategies will be refined in the new year. “With up to 80% of enterprises having adopted multicloud, such environments are set to dominate enterprises’ digital transformation ideals in 2019. That being said, in today’s rapidly evolving ecosystem, many businesses remain undecided on their cloud strategy," he said.

Source: Micro Focus. McNulty.

Lim added that the data lake will begin to disappear in favour of technology which can discover, profile, map data where it lives. This reduces storage and infrastructure costs and enables data strategies that can “truly provide insights to improve operations, mitigate risks and potentially lead to new business outcomes”, he said.

The edge between the public cloud and telco networks will be a battleground as well, says Juniper Networks.

“The hyperscale cloud players have clearly demonstrated the power of their massive networks in terms of application hosting and development. But it’s the telcos that have the beachfront property in their established network infrastructure that’s closest to end users.

Source: Juniper. Bament.

"Cloud providers will try to build an edge of their own, but service providers (SPs) will remain keepers of the edge as they can compete with much better economic scale. Over the next year, service providers and cloud providers will compete to win the edge but expect more cloud-SP partnerships to unfold as the year progresses,” said Sally Bament, VP, Service Provider Marketing, Juniper Networks.

"To fully benefit from the flexibility of hybrid cloud, organisations need a consistent framework that ensures security, governance, and metadata management. This will simplify the development and deployment of applications, regardless of where data is stored and applications are run. This framework will also ensure that companies can use a variety of machine learning and analytic capabilities, working in concert with data from different sources into a single coherent picture, without the associated complexity,” added Mark Micallef, VP for Asia Pacific and Japan, Cloudera.

Source: Cloudera.
Micallef.

Increased investment in data management in the cloud is to be expected, Micallef said.

He said: “New data types will continue to be required to satisfy business analytics, including social media and IoT, driving the need for inexpensive, flexible storage best served by data management in the cloud. The cloud will also support emerging and new use cases such as exploration - iteratively performing ad-hoc queries into data sets to gain insights through discovering patterns - and machine learning without increasing IT resource demands, fuelling further adoption.”

Securing the cloud

Where there is complexity, there is confusion and the potential to make a mistake. Said McNulty: “With a lack of overview surrounding the cloud landscape, enterprises must gain an understanding of how they can manage their services across different providers and models amid more complex and dynamic multicloud environments in 2019.

"To do so, enterprises will hone in on a concrete strategy and define management processes in order to stay nimble and agile in an evolving environment. One crucial aspect of this will be learning how to apply consistent security and management policies across all their platforms, without letting performance take a hit,” he said.

Source: F5 Networks. Veloo.

F5 Networks' State of Application Delivery 2018 report found that confidence in protecting cloud-based apps declined 4% year-on-year, dropping from 45% in 2017 to 41% in 2018. “This was due to the lack of experience and expertise in securing applications deployed in public clouds,” said Mohan Veloo, Regional Tech Lead, Asia Pacific, China and Japan, F5 Networks.

“Having a consistent set of application services that can be applied to any app, anywhere is key to ensuring security quality across the entire application portfolio; this will help them to maximise the value of their application capital. Businesses need to ensure that they continue to focus on building the foundation for app-driven customer experiences which are faster, smarter and safer,” he said.

Not surprisingly, Trend Micro's Mapping the Future: Dealing with Pervasive and Persistent Threats report predicts that 2019 will see more major data breach cases that will be a direct result of misconfigurations during migration to the cloud.

Source: Trend Micro.
Jain. 

Said Greg Young, VP, cybersecurity for Trend Micro at the launch of the report results: “As both the corporate attack surface and unknown cyberthreats increase, it’s more important than ever for organisations to put more resources behind employee education to help protect against these growing attacks.”

“With the public cloud market predicted to grow 17.3% globally in 2019 and more enterprises moving their data from on-premise data centres to the cloud environment, we anticipate at least two breaches that will be a direct result of misconfiguration during cloud migration. This is largely due to the fact that each cloud migration is unique in terms of scope and pacing, and best migration practices need to be tweaked to suit a company’s specific needs," noted Nilesh Jain, VP, SEA & India, Trend Micro.

"In 2019, with the rise of DevSecOps and use of containers, we expect more vulnerabilities to be discovered in the cloud environment. Today, as many as one third of containers are laden with vulnerabilities, and developers who pull these infected containers run the risk of introducing vulnerabilities into their software or systems.

"Currently, there is already some container vulnerability-scanning technology on the market. We should see an increase of awareness and adoption in this arena in the coming year.”

Source: Gemalto. Au.

Michael Au, President South Asia & Japan, Gemalto, said that cloud migration security specialists will be increasingly significant as a result of such trends. He sees this role as one that channel partners can take on.

“As organisations embrace digital transformation, the process of migrating to the cloud has never been under more scrutiny; from business leaders looking to minimise any downtime and gain positive impact on the bottom line, to hackers looking to breach systems and wreak havoc,” he said.

“As such, 2019 will see the rise of a new role for the channel – the cloud migration security specialist. As companies move across, there is an assumption that they’re automatically protected as they transition workloads to the cloud. The channel has a role to play in educating companies that this isn’t necessarily the case and they’ll need help protecting themselves from threats. It’s these new roles that’ll ensure the channel continues to thrive.”

As the years pass, cloud computing is becoming increasingly well-understood and easier to handle. Things may not yet be seamless, but we are definitely getting closer to the ideal.

Explore:

Browse the full list of 2018 round-ups and 2019 predictions in TechTrade Asia

Read the TechTrade Asia blog posts about Australia and New Zealand's love affair with hybrid cloud 
and Juniper Networks' study on IoT in a multicloud environment