It’s an interesting time in the cloud computing industry. Cloud is an established technology, and it’s the default deployment model for new applications and services. But at the same time, the majority of enterprise workloads still live on-premises. As the market approaches a crossroads, we asked experts from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and the industry at large to share their predictions for 2019.
Karan Batta
Director of Product Management, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
@karan_batta
For a lot of organizations, AI and machine learning are still a science experiment. But in 2019, most of them will start to implement these technologies in production. That will drive a lot more usage of high-performance computing (HPC) in the cloud.
At the same time, companies have spent millions of dollars to build bespoke and very specific data centers for their HPC workloads, and the hardware is now coming up to its depreciation cycle. Most of these businesses want to move to the cloud because they don’t want to have to keep buying new hardware. The pace of innovation is so quick now that cloud providers are introducing new hardware every year. On-premises shops can’t keep up with that.
Mark Cliff Lynd
Managing Partner, Relevant Track
@mclynd
Enterprises are struggling to manage and maintain their hybrid-cloud environments. Vendors will be needed to fill the automation, orchestration, management, and security gaps to ensure a seamless environment that supports their growth.
The use of containers and orchestration products like Kubernetes will grow, and security offerings will need to integrate and collaborate accordingly.
Bob Quillin
Vice President, Developer Relations, Oracle Cloud Native Labs
@bobquillin
Enterprises will choose inclusive solutions that can cover cloud and on-premises, modern and traditional, dev and ops. Managed cloud native services will replace do-it-yourself models so enterprises can leapfrog learning how to administer and maintain complex, rapidly changing platforms like Kubernetes and instead start using them immediately.
Truly open and community-driven solutions in areas such as serverless will replace proprietary cloud services. These will allow enterprises to embrace open source, hybrid cloud, and multicloud options, as opposed to the single-source cloud model that has left users with cloud lock-in issues, diminished choices, and spiraling costs.
Andy Thurai
Emerging Technology Strategist and Evangelist, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
@AndyThurai
Open source software and the pay-as-you-go model will dominate the cloud industry in 2019. This will lead to newer licensing models for all enterprise software. Instead of pricing based on the cores, servers, and machines the software runs on, the market will demand pricing based on the volume of data, time of usage, and — most importantly — business value.
Cheaper combined costs from software, hardware, infrastructure, storage, etc. will lead to higher operational efficiency. This will free up enterprises to spend more time and energy on experimenting with their data, business models, and expansion into adjacent areas.
Sophina Kio-Lawson and Lilian Douglas
Cofounders, SheSecures
@she_secures
There is going to be a huge demand for more public cloud services from different industries, from the telecommunications sector to financial institutions, health sectors, etc. A lot of organizations ran into losses from managing their super-expensive physical data centers.
Andrew Reichman
Director of Product Management, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
@reichmanIT
The industry’s shift from infrastructure as a service to platform as a service will continue in 2019. Cloud vendors are moving up the stack to get to stickier solutions and offer end users more automation, which adds value faster. As this happens, storage will be more closely tied to the workload running. Instead of customers selecting and configuring storage on their own, higher-level solutions will allow customers to better tailor storage services to meet the needs of the workload itself.
Additionally, there will be deeper usage of object storage. This has the potential to ease capacity concerns and reduce the effort required to manage and change workload configurations, because storage management can be coded directly into an application.
Laurent Gil
Security Product Strategy Architect, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
@laurentgil
Enterprise multi-cloud strategies are going to have some unintended consequences. As enterprises accelerate their move to the cloud over the next two to three years, their security operations centers will have to become fluent in powerful data analytics systems. These systems must be able to ingest and reconcile incompatible and apparently uncorrelated security events, using massive compute capacity, and organize relevant security events for human analysts.