How the Cloud Will Evolve in 2016

 Featured article by Sarah Lahav, CEO of SysAid Technologies

Cloud is a disruptive, US$100bn “fast fish,” eating up the slow fish in the enormous technology fishbowl that’s a massive US$3.8tn in size. The cloud will be ten years old next year and will continue to pick up momentum and speed even when many would imagine that, after ten years, growth would slow down. However, evolving enterprise IT attitudes towards cloud show a move away from focusing on IT infrastructure to an almost consumer-like consumption of cloud through service models such as software-as-a-service.

In 2016 the impact of cloud will trigger organizational dichotomies in many enterprise IT organizations – as they struggle to handle both legacy and future IT; and nowhere will this be more obvious than in the difference between experienced IT practitioners and cloud natives, such as graduates. Given all of this change, cloud service providers will become an “economic bellwether” for the IT industry because of the large number of global businesses reliant upon them. Given the potential for global businesses to become so reliant on cloud, cloud could become too big to fail – as a large cloud-provider collapse would trigger a cascade of large business failures and potentially an economic downturn.

The Total Cloud Platform Becomes All-Pervasive and Unstoppable

When you consider “total cloud,” i.e. all deployment models (private, community, hybrid, and public) and all service models (infrastructure, platform, software, et al), then it’s clear that cloud is becoming all-pervasive and is establishing itself as an industry baseline – that cloud is something you do first, by default. Anything you need to do in IT you can now do in cloud, and the question most enterprises are asking is “Why would I go to the effort of building this myself when I could just rent it, and throw it away if it doesn’t work?” Cloud has a powerful agility and cost message to any executive leadership team.

In 2016, cloud will go from strength to strength because it’s now an unstoppable platform, triggering exponential network effects. Cloud enables value as a core part of the social, media, analytics, and cloud-based business revolution. People are not “doing cloud for cloud’s sake,” they are using it as an enabling platform for some higher function. The corporate sales people that manage their customers via a software-as-a-service CRM system are using the cloud, whether they know it or not (and that awareness is not important in this instance).

Enterprises Bend to the Cloud Wind that Blows

Much is made of the innovative technologies used by cloud providers – technologies that operate at web-scale. From Google’s data center as a computer to Facebook’s open sourcing of their technology. However, while these are interesting advances, they will not be the main cloud story in 2016.

Cloud has always been, primarily, a service and it has demanded that its users interact with it in a different and very strict way – through single consoles and open APIs. The cloud doesn’t bend to all kinds of customer demands, it’s the other way around. Clever, fast-fish companies codify business processes to effectively daisy-chain cloud services together to form a virtual business very quickly and for little cost. These companies, such as Uber and Airbnb, are disrupting established markets where the incumbents have not exploited the cloud, even though the enterprises they are disrupting have exactly the same access to exactly the same tools.

So in 2016, whatever your company’s vertical: cloud is happening to you, whether you like it or not.

Old Habits Die Hard and the Rise of Talent Anti-Gravity

Non-technical business users readily move to software-as-a-service because it has less friction and more value to them than many old-fashioned, internal IT deployments. From CRM to messaging to collaboration, all are preferred consumed as-a-service rather than relying on an internal IT team to take a technology vendor’s product and try to “origami it” into the shape they think their end users need.

Seasoned IT practitioners have the most to lose from not adapting to cloud’s growth. To stay relevant, they need to learn new skills in programming, public cloud, APIs, and generally move up the technology stack. Also key to continued relevancy is a learning attitude and openness to culture change, and to acknowledge that new skills are required – or, to put it another way, that these experienced team members are now missing required skills. This can be a difficult thing for experienced staff to own up to, but a failure to do so, and then to adapt, could also damage a business’ ability to ride the cloud wave.