Predictions from Jerry Melnick, president and CEO, SIOS Technology, on possible 2019 developments in high availability, devops, and IT operations analytics.
(Editor’s Note: Where did the year go? 2019 is almost upon us, and the brightest minds in the real-time analytics space are looking forward to the new year and taking their guess at where they think this space is going. Help us expand the discussion and build out the future of real-time by joining the RTInsights Brain Trust)
Here’s the forecast from Jerry Melnick, president and CEO, SIOS Technology, with five major developments he sees in cloud, high availability and IT service management, devops, and IT operations analytics next year:
1. Advances in Technology Will Make the Cloud Substantially More Suitable for Critical Applications
Advances in technology will make the cloud substantially more suitable for critical applications. With IT staff now becoming more comfortable in the cloud, their concerns about security and reliability, especially for five-9’s of uptime, have diminished substantially. Initially, organizations will prefer to use whatever failover clustering technology they currently use in their data centers to protect the critical applications being migrated to the cloud. This clustering technology will also be adapted and optimized for enhanced operations the cloud. At the same time, cloud service providers will continue to advance their service levels, leading to the cloud ultimately becoming the preferred platform for all enterprise applications.
2. Dynamic Utilization Will Make HA and DR More Cost-effective for More Applications, Further Driving Migration to the Cloud
Dynamic utilization of the cloud’s vast resources will enable IT to more effectively manage and orchestrate the services needed to support mission-critical applications. With its virtually unlimited resources spread around the globe, the cloud is the ideal platform for delivering high uptime. But provisioning standby resources that sit idle most of the time has been cost-prohibitive for many applications. The increasing sophistication of fluid cloud resources deployed across multiple zones and regions, all connected via high-quality internetworking, now enables standby resources to be allocated dynamically only when needed, which will dramatically lower the cost of provisioning high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) protections.
See also: 5 tips to keep from being trapped in the cloud
3. The Cloud Will Become a Preferred Platform for SAP Deployments
Given its mission-critical nature, IT departments have historically chosen to implement SAP and SAP S4/HANA in enterprise data centers, where the staff enjoys full control over the environment. As the platforms offered by cloud service providers continue to mature, their ability to host SAP applications will become commercially viable and, therefore, strategically important. For CSPs, SAP hosting will be a way to secure long-term engagements with enterprise customers. For the enterprise, “SAP-as-a-Service” will be a way to take full advantage of the enormous economies of scale in the cloud without sacrificing performance or availability.
4. Cloud “Quick-Start” Templates Will Become the Standard for Complex Software and Service Deployments
Quick-start templates will become the standard for complex software and service deployments in private, public and hybrid clouds. These templates are wizard-based interfaces that employ automated scripts to dynamically provision, configure and orchestrate the resources and services needed to run specific applications. Among their key benefits are reduced training requirements, improved speed and accuracy, and the ability to minimize or even eliminate human error as a major source of problems. By making deployments more turnkey, quick-start templates will substantially decrease the time and effort it takes for DevOps staff to set up, test and roll out dependable configurations.
5. Advanced Analytics and Artificial Intelligence Will Be Everywhere and in Everything, Including Infrastructure Operations
Advanced analytics and artificial intelligence will continue becoming more highly focused and purpose-built for specific needs, and these capabilities will increasingly be embedded in management tools. This much-anticipated capability will simplify IT operations, improve infrastructure and application robustness, and lower overall costs. Along with this trend, AI and analytics will become embedded in high availability and disaster recovery solutions, as well as cloud service provider offerings to improve service levels. With the ability to quickly, automatically and accurately understand issues and diagnose problems across complex configurations, the reliability, and thus the availability, of critical services delivered from the cloud will vastly improve.
