What's in the cloud? More and more, enterprises, that's what. As the people in charge of data networks and security continue to migrate applications to the cloud, this year is sure to be a hive of activity including many new technologies and services.
With this in mind, here are three trends happening now that everyone should watch out for in the coming months.
AWS Outposts - A Step into the Cloud
The concern of every Fortune 500 CIO has always been how to migrate to the cloud with confidence. At Amazon's Re:Invent conference, a solution solution for cloud transformation surfaced. AWS Outposts (fully configured computer and storage racks built with AWS designed hardware) is Amazon's full-on venture into on-premise data centers. IT experts should understand:
With Outposts, cloud becomes more about services and a sound operating model, and less about where the infrastructure resides. In the past, public cloud providers shared their vision of "cloud as final destination." With the introduction of AWS Outposts, cloud becomes more about how data and computing services are provisioned and operated at scale to accelerate innovation - and less about where infrastructure lives.
Outposts also gives the enterprise a new path to full cloud migration by running an AWS environment with more control and visibility. If Outposts doesn't provide access to Layer 2, Prisms can assist, providing the access, visibility and control needed for packet traffic streaming on this new hybrid cloud.
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Adopt a Cloud-First Strategy
For organizations with strong confidence and proven applications already riding on public clouds, adopting a cloud-first strategy for all IT decision making will become the new norm.Cloud first is simply a tech philosophy designed to maximize AWS and Microsoft Azure as a core business strategy. Cloud offers organizations the ability to keep servers up no matter what, so critical business operations aren't using up valuable resources for maintenance, updates, upgrades, and infrastructure expansion demands.
As cloud migration becomes the norm, organizations will demand simplicity and high-performance that matches their experience in traditional data centers. That means moving security to the cloud, which means tapping a solution that provides the right level of access, visibility, and control of critical packet streams.
Micro Services Leads to Serverless Environments
While no longer a surprising trend - 83% of enterprise workloads will be in the cloud by 2020 - how to best manage this digital transformation is sure to remain a hot topic.
The next trends to watch is the all-out adoption of containerization - using Docker, kubernetes, containers, and a micro services architecture. The smaller and more containerized applications become, the easier it will be to deliver updates without impacting the entire system.
What's does it all mean? Companies will either begin to or accelerate blowing up their monolithic application designs and code stacks. They are accelerating the creation of new micro services architectures designed to run in containerized environments. This re-tooling will be followed by serverless computer capabilities. Serverless means the enterprise IT team can simply run a slice of code without spinning up a database, app server, or web server to execute it.
Just like line manufacturing developed a better way to mass produce products, serverless capabilities will create efficiencies for the enterprise - enabling IT to get more done with less time at a lower cost. It's already happening with AWS Lambdas and Azure functions.
These rapid and exciting evolutions in networking and DevOps must also bring evolutions in security, monitoring, and access. Applying security and visibility solutions to these ephemeral environments is still a tall task that many cloud architects are just realizing. Garland can answer the question of, "how do I monitor, acquire, process, and distribute packets needed for these serverless functions."
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