The Cloud and Data Center Industry in 2017 -Summing Up the Year

As it has been observed since 2016, there are big volumes of workloads from the data centers of enterprises, and they would have started operating in Cloud. Cloud migration of enterprises moved to a higher level in the year 2017. This migration left its mark through the industry of data centre, thus establishing some noticeable changes, not only for the tech vendors but for the providers of data centre, as well. The vendors of technology in data centers have had a realignment of their resources, strategies, and portfolios of products, so that they can cater to the clients who work on data centers hosting cloud infrastructure. Vendors of Information Technology hardware are still struggling because the proposition of core value has deteriorated, with the development of the cloud providers’ hardware design, as well as their supply chain abilities, as the driving force.

Migration

The senior staff members in data centers, as well as infrastructure operations have been observed to be either in the middle on an ongoing project of cloud migration, or to be strategizing such a project, actively, with the majority of them associated with some house-hold name brands. Cloud providers, as well as customers, are often prohibited by contract provisions from publicly revealing the business relationships they share. But, a few deals are always public. From NFS to Walt Disney, from Toyota to FICO, brands are moving towards cloud services, and they are all undergoing migration, for which agreements have been signed by them.

This enormous wave of migration to cloud system by the enterprises has its reflection in the growth rates of their revenues, based on the reports that the cloud giants have provided. There is a steady growth of revenue by 40% every year, as shown by the cloud providers’ analyses of the earnings of Synergy Research Group in the third quarter. PaaS, IaaS, etc. were included in the the analyst firm, in the service category of cloud infrastructure. The biggest names in the industry, starting from AWS and Google to Alibaba and Microsoft have reported their growth in cloud revenues.

Hybrid Cloud

With the rise in the competition for cloud dollars in case of enterprises, cloud providers that offer public services are trying to figure out methods of enabling the customers to establish connection with their on-premise network of devices with the cloud services. These strategies of hybrid cloud have been hugely discussed all through the year, and attracted some serious attention. VMware and AWS began the process of setting in motion the first batch of products as well as services which came into being as a result of the partnership that was announced between the two names in the year 2016. They also started the process of enabling their customers to use VMware servers manly in those areas where AWS is available. The customers will be able to utilize AWS as a backup, replacing their data centers for disaster recovery.

The shipping of Azure Stack was started by Microsoft. It is the on-premise environment of Azure, which allows the integration with public cloud, even though there is no need for this. Some partnerships were announced by Google Cloud, all of which focused on hybrid cloud, which include Scale Computing and Nutanix, leaders of hyper converged infrastructure. There has also been a partnership between Google and Cisco, and this deal is particularly interesting, because its objective is the combination of hardware stack by Cisco’s HyperFlex and the software stack by Google Cloud.

Resilience and Infallibility of Cloud

Several companies are now running major applications in cloud, and while doing so, they received a lesson that is important for every person who handles the workloads through cloud providers. They understood that while apps have the capability to run in the cloud, its uptime still depends on the designer or the company. This basically means that cloud may be strong, but there is no guarantee of its infallibility. There are other proofs of the same. In March, the outrage by AWS resulting from one typographical error by an engineer while entering the command led to the fall of big service providers such as Slack, Medium, Quora, Coursera and Expedia, among others. According to the estimates of a company dealing with cyber-risk models, S&P 500 brands lost around $150 million.

Experts say that AWS customers would have been able to handle this outrage, like many of the companies did, if they had invested some additional time and finance in the architecture of their apps using more resilient methods. In its essence, it all boils down to the creation of redundancy, in different availability regions as well as cloud providers, besides utilizing caching services for the storage of several copies of files in various locations.