Top 5 Predictions on Cloud Computing for 2017

By: Balaji Rao, Managing Director, Veritas, India

As we close out 2016, digitalization continues to be a buzzword in India, with many enterprises undergoing some form of digital transformation in the era of cloud. Moving into 2017, the overall IT spending is projected to reach $72.4 Billion and the key verticals driving this growth include communications, media & services, banking & securities, manufacturing and utilities.
With nearly three-quarters of enterprises indicating they would continue to adopt multiple private and public cloud strategies in a recent survey commissioned by Veritas, we see that cloud is no longer “optional” for organizations looking to remain competitive. As data growth continues to explode and as more organizations move critical business functions over to the cloud, expectations are high for how it will revolutionize the way organizations approach development and innovation.
At Veritas, we are committed to help our customers to address their IT challenges, especially in an increasingly fragmented landscape, with data located almost anywhere, from a variety of traditional storage space to public or private cloud environments. In light of this, Balaji Rao, Managing Director, Veritas, India offers some key predictions on cloud computing which will impact enterprises in 2017.
Continued acceleration toward the public cloud – Customers increasingly migrated to the public cloud in 2016 and this will only accelerate -- both in speed and numbers -- in 2017. With more of their information in the cloud, organizations will look to better manage their data to maintain uptime, protection and governance. They will also increasingly be on the lookout for tools that enable them to make sense of their data and extra value from it as a competitive advantage.
Accelerated adoption of software as a service (SaaS) – Globally, customers are adopting SaaS more quickly than the public cloud. In 2017, SaaS will grow to become an even bigger part of the enterprise software market as enterprises and organizations of all sizes look to consolidate their cloud and on-premises based business functions and IT strategies. Vendors that can support both scenarios -- and that can help customers navigate and streamline this complex shift -- will win in 2017.
Information governance as a competitive advantage – New global regulations such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) began rolling out in 2016 with the intention of strengthening and unifying data protection. In 2017, organizations around the world will learn to comply with these new protection and privacy regulations, all while adapting to the changing global markets and the increasing adoption of cloud computing along with moving larger amounts of data in the cloud. Considering this, information governance tools will increasingly become a differentiator and competitive advantage for organizations, pushing them to address any regulatory gaps within their own businesses and providing their customers with better protection and peace of mind.
The continuing rise of emerging technologies like software-defined storage – Accelerating towards the cloud does not mean that businesses’ storage needs will disappear. Quite the opposite. Companies will need to be able to manage storage holistically based on real business needs, such as uptime, cost and responsiveness. In 2017, as organizations look for more turnkey-style solutions for managing storage across their hardware, a new generation of software-defined storage will help them align and merge their cloud and on-premises strategies.
Learned coexistence with hyperscalers – Hyperscale companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google will continue to invest tens billions of dollars into their cloud efforts in 2017. What does this mean for traditional IT vendors? As their investments grow, and the sheer volume of data and number of workloads rise, traditional hardware and software vendors must learn to coexist with these huge hyperscale players. For enterprises, this means investing in technology that will integrate with hyperscalers and the cloud, potentially providing benefits such as reduced downtime and increasing the potential for new kinds of innovation.