Johannesburg, 28 Sep 2018
There are seven major trends that organisations who are thinking of hybrid IT need to be aware of, says Dan Greengarten, SVP Sales, Cloud Services, and Alliances at Dimension Data.
The first trend, is transforming customer experiences and targeted business outcomes with the Internet of things (IOT)
For IOT to deliver real business value, Greengarten believes it's critical that organisations stop thinking about it as simply a collection of connected sensors and devices.
He says that companies that focus on the business outcomes from the start of the project, will see real value, while organisations trying to solve many disparate business problems, find that its lack of focus is less likely to lead to success.
Hybrid cloud cost containment
The second trend, he says, is hybrid cloud cost containment. Three to four years ago, many organisations made the decision to move a significant portion of their infrastructure, and anything new, into the public cloud. They assumed that this would enable them to drive out costs and reduce both operational complexity and headcount.
Today, many businesses have realised that few or none of these objectives have been met.
Greengarten says that in the next 12 months, we'll see businesses carefully assessing the return on investment delivered by 'generation 1' cloud projects. They'll also reduce and / or review its consumption-based opex budgets in favour of what could be developed in-house, this time using more intelligent tools. In addition, rather than continuing to consume public cloud, many organisations will consider building private clouds.
The platform economy
The third trend, according to him, is increasing understanding of the platform economy. Digital marketplaces are changing the face of business, and organisations will recognise the true potential of the platform economy, and begin to realise its impact on their operating models.
As more businesses shift to a 'digital front end', revenue-generating digital assets demand fundamental changes in organisational operating models. Running a digital business with platform-based services differs from traditional operating models.
In the platform economy, the risk shifts from the consumer to the provider. Businesses that operate platforms, need to make significant upfront investments to build their platforms - before they generate any revenue. They need to change its commercial and pricing models to factor in new risks.
In the platform economy, Greengarten says sales cycles can be longer and generate less upfront fees. Organisations therefore need to think about how they manage cash flow fluctuations and how they remunerate their sales force.
Hybrid cloud solutions are becoming verticalised
Throughout 2018, Greengarten says that we will see more vertical cloud solutions on the market. Smaller cloud providers are looking for ways to differentiate from the hyperscalers, as they've realised that they need to find new ways to drive scale and grow market share via a deep vertical focus.
In the year ahead we can expect to see these smaller players investing significantly in industry-specific compliance regimes for different verticals to build credibility with its target market.
He says the result will be hybrid cloud offerings that span the entire spectrum of the XaaS stack and deliver a comprehensive solution for specific verticals.
These solutions will cover everything from the infrastructure layer, to platform tools that customers' development teams can use to build new services without the fear of any compliance breaches, to applications delivering the service.
The rise of hybrid cloud management solutions
The fifth trend, says Greengarten, is that businesses will continue to commit to multi-cloud architectures, both public and private, and from several different providers. While there are significant benefits to this approach, it can result in greater management complexity.
As a result, businesses are recognising the importance of having a defined set of management tools to run operations, and we can expect to see an increase in demand for hybrid cloud management solutions. Specifically, organisations will invest in hybrid cloud management solutions allowing standard services to be created.
Businesses use cloud to deliver services to their internal users and/or its external customer base. If they're operating a platform, they need to standardise various components to deliver a particular offer. Hybrid cloud management tools allow this.
Industry skills and talent pool continue to shrink
Trend number six, is that the talent pool of people available to help organisations architect, implement, and operate hybrid cloud solutions will continue to shrink.
This shortage of skills will generate new opportunities for managed services providers that can deliver highly automated services, he says. Why is automation so critical? The more a service provider can automate elements of a client's IT environment, the lower the costs to deliver the service and the subsequent cost to go to market.
This also benefits the client, as by delivering services to customers in a more automated manner, the costs of providing it is also reduced and it can be offered at a lower price-point.
In addition, software engineering will become the essential trade of the 2020s. In 2018, we'll start to see this manifesting in a war for talent. There'll be a significant spike in demand for software development talent graduating from tertiary institutions, as organisations seek the skills required to build digital front-ends.
Cyber security posture
The seventh trend, is that there will be the expectation for service providers to deliver a unified, embedded cyber security posture - across all platforms and services, says Greengarten.
Organisations that appoint service providers to take on the management of their hybrid, multiple, dispersed, and potentially unrelated IT platforms, will expect them to enable a security posture that spans the entire platform.
Companies will expect their service providers to offer robust security measures that cover on-premise and cloud-based assets, the network, and applications - all built into an intelligent security core, he says.
Greengarten says in evaluating service providers, businesses should consider their ability to provide a holistic approach to cybersecurity and to identify threats and risks across multi-faceted, distributed architectures, including on-premise, cloud, and hybrid environments.
In conclusion, he says providers should demonstrate an understanding of how digital infrastructure, digital workplaces, and cloud environments expose new risks.
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