The public cloud and its associated companies get the most attention in the cloud market. However, the growth of private and hybrid cloud companies looks promising this year. Experts predict that hybrid and private cloud companies will be the mainstay of the cloud market this year.
According to Forrester Research Analyst Dave Bartoletti and colleagues, only a few companies have gained the benefits of private infrastructure-focused clouds yet, but a renewed focus on developer empowerment, walking into the cloud “on-premises ” first, and a bundle of new technology stacks will spark rejuvenate private cloud experimentation and interest.
According to IDC, traditional data centers made up 62 percent of IT infrastructure in 2018, with approximately 23 percent of the market opting for public cloud over the 15 percent who choose private cloud.
According to estimates, data center growth will slow down and only account for half of the market by 2020. The public cloud will hold less than a third of market share, while the private cloud will take 20 percent. While data centers are losing their importance, public and private cloud are becoming more important.
Hybrid Cloud Strategies
The last year saw major IaaS public clouds vendors clarify their strategies in order to make 2018 the year of adoption. Microsoft has taken the biggest step forward in this regard, having market it for over two years. They have now released Azure Stack, a private cloud IaaS platform that could serve as a mirror to public Azure cloud.
Amazon Web Services has partnered up with Silicon Valley’s Virtualization giants to offer VMware on its AWS hybrid cloud offering. The Google Cloud platform has formed partnerships with Nutanix and VMware. IBM and Oracle both have their own hybrid cloud offerings.
These products are all on the market right now. It will be time to evaluate their traction and determine the best use cases.
The Private Cloud Battle
After moving workloads to the cloud and thoroughly testing it, organizations are now able to gain valuable insight into the best use of the cloud. Rackspace executive vice president Scott Crenshaw says that Rackspace is seeing customers who want cloud-like infrastructure and application development resources in more specialized or hybrid environments. As businesses find the right balance between private and public clouds, platforms such as Microsoft Azure Stack, VMware and OpenStack, and others from vendors such as Red Hat and HP Enterprise, will continue to grow, he says.
Containers and PaaS are Hybrid clouds
Cloud computing is a huge market that allows developers to quickly innovate, experiment, and create new business value. Maria Azua Himmel (senior vice president of Distributed Systems at Fidelity), says that developers must not commit to one type of cloud but use both public and private clouds. Fidelity uses containers in order to ensure that applications can run in any infrastructure environment. The company uses a combination of PaaS, automation tools such as Terraforms, Jenkins and Docker.
Cloud Connection Optimization
Azua claims that organizations rarely use either a public or private cloud, but they do have workloads in both. Any significant use of Hybrid Cloud can benefit from an optimized network connection. In recent years, there has been a boom in interconnection providers.
Hybrid Cloud is fast becoming the norm. Services such as its management, optimization, and establishment will be a priority.
Machine Learning (ML) is a leading technology that could be used to enter private and hybrid cloud environments. Public cloud providers are attempting to be the first to offer ML and Artificial Intelligence.
