IT is now mandated with the mantra, “Focus on the Core IT” rather than being just the enabler for businesses. This basically deciphers into - No more a support function!

Only few years back, IT in captive organization was looked upon for supporting email, networks, end user assets and applications; today the expectations are changing from “Support” to “Live and drive business growth”. Upon passage of white light of IT through the Prism it gets seen into three broad IT subject areas - Classical IT, Core IT and backbone Infrastructure. To drive business value question which gets asked internally is, Why should IT do anything, which is repeatable and can be done by large IT Services Enterprises for whom it is core and can be operated at a scale.

"With more and more on offer everybody wants best of all the worlds and capability to go across cloud environments- from IaaS to PaaS to SaaS"

t starts right from a simple example of creating, securing and running classical IT  services (viz email) which might typically does not need infrastructure, system administrators, security infrastructure, operational monitoring. Given business demands, if there is option of picking the service from a shared platform (Cloud) with your own  segregation and security priorities addressed, Cloud makes more sense as service when needed and not worry about uptime of these services - for an email is finally an email.

Early on, it was perceived to be only startups doing it for cost efficiency and agility they needed but who doesn’t like to be fast and economical, whether large or small, in fact scale of economies work better for large scale businesses in some cases, the only hurdle sometime back was a big shift and risk of transition over a period of time. Times have changed, confidence among enterprises has started to buildup and it has to only grow from hereon.

Shift to Hybrid Deployments

Hybrid has been a key for large enterprises to go full throttle. Hybrid provides a safety net with the right pace for adoption of technology while keeping the lights ON. This setup has jump started many large organizations that were unsure about moving completely to cloud and has also proved to be a key differentiator. However this just does not end here, one size does not fit all and there are multiple choices across platforms - starting from SaaS, PaaS, IaaS.

The decision making process for the applications and infrastructure to adopt and discard becomes easier, since you have heard a lot by now and it’s the time to initiate.

Hybrid Cloud is here to stay for good since this set up has been working well and most enterprises want to wait till they have some firm experiences as one wave of cloud journey gets completed. In the years to come this may further get simplified, with more and more confidence and buy-in of their respective organization strategy around cloud becomes clearer and also leadership mindset across the board shifts from Managed Services to Manage Cloud Services.

Reliance on Powerful Analytics

Analytics, in my opinion, is the most complex piece of puzzle for an enterprise application landscape; it is like an ocean of data points within the organization for all satellite applications which are as good as rivers or streams pouring into it. Good or bad, analytics can make a difference to the busine sses and as businesses grow, not only the core needs of analytics infrastructure/ setup grow but also capability to adapt to the changes becomes very critical.

Yes, cloud deployment cost and capability to change fast can be a good reason to shift. But at the same time it is very important to understand the over all ecosystem which talks to analytics and what kind of Integration services are available across the lines of product and services. Key points to be considered and thought before taking a call on analytics on cloud are exposure of varied cloud platforms at different datacenters (most likely if using SaaS), data flows across applications, integration capabilities, hybrid integration (on-premise to cloud and vice versa) and most critical security of your data. Good reference on such a versatile setup is yet to be seen. It is just the beginning and very simply put consolidated environments in a single cloud data center are giving this a try. Theyare successful as well as integrated with right connectors in the same environment.

The Next Big Thing

Integrations! Integrations! Integrations! With more and more on offer everybody wants best of all the worlds and capability to go across cloud environments- from  IaaS to PaaS to SaaS. Imagine a complex enterprise architecture with multiple providers playing a key role in varied setup across environments and they have a strong need to talk almost real time. This will be the biggest challenge- seamless, any time, any where and secure Integrations. We can expect large broker platforms very soon delivering exactly this.