Editor's Note: The following predictions are part of a 2-part series of cloud predictions from David Friend, CEO, Wasabi … To see Mr. Friend's profile and portfolio on Thinkers360 please visit David Friend.
1) Public Clouds: The Public Cloud will continue to grow as business owners resist further monetary investments in their own private data centers. Buying and baby-sitting a roomful of servers can be a pain in the neck and often tangential to a company's core business. As a result, savvy executives should look at outsourcing this hardware infrastructure to the cloud in 2020.
2) Private Clouds: Hyperscalers like AWS will alienate many of the companies they would like to have as customers when those companies realize they can outsource their existing physical infrastructure while maintaining control over how their data is used. Meanwhile, some cloud services, notably storage, will blur the lines between private and public cloud as the world starts to understand the paradigm of data storage as just a commodity, like electricity or bandwidth. In 2020, executives should investigate how their company’s data is being used by their storage providers and consider alternatives.
3) Hybrid Clouds: For a variety of reasons, many applications still need to run either entirely on-premises or on some combination of proprietary gear plus cloud. Most large organizations still have enormous IT footprints with hundreds or thousands of servers to back up. Increasingly those servers are getting backed up to the cloud. The "hybrid cloud," will reign for years with the balance changing slowly over time. Executives with on-prem data should make sure they have a hybrid cloud backup strategy in place in order to maximize redundancy and increase efficiency.
By David Friend
Keywords: Cloud, Digital Transformation, Data Center