Agile Digital Transformation

KEVIN L. JACKSON
Editor, Government Cloud Computing on Ulitzer

1. The US Federal government will award over $2B in cloud computing related contracts.

2. The European Union will establish a European community cloud computing strategy and governance framework similar to the US FedRAMP program

3. Major cyber attacks coupled with the rapid adoption of cloud computing by governments will cause a crescendo in security concerns.

4. Concerns regarding national sovereignty vis-à-vis economic advantages of using cloud computing threaten to slow the growth of international government cloud computing.

5. Major cloud providers will adopt common, interoperable infrastructure-as-a-service technical standards.

Kevin L. Jackson (right) with Cloud Expo conference chair Jeremy Geelan

LARRY CARVALHO
2011 Instructor, Cloud Computing Bootcamp | New York: June 6-9 | Silicon Valley: November 7-10

1. Systems integrators, feeling their existing business model is threatened, start building product offerings based on cloud computing. Currently, complexity is the pain point that systems integrators hone in on to sell their domain knowledge to customers. In the future, systems integrators will use their domain knowledge to reduce complexity for their customers. This trend has already started but will continue in a big way.

2. Acquisitions continue but success will be based on how well the acquired capabilities gets merged into the acquiring company offerings. Some companies have been very successful in the past few years by cutting down R&D expenses. This looks good in the short term but in the long term the only way to build new products is through acquisitions. The challenge will continue to be in the merging of cultures of different organizations.

3. Hiccups(outages, security break-ins) will continue to raise challenges to acceptance of public cloud computing. On-premise infrastructure have their share of outages which does not make big news. Financial companies go out of their way to keep security break-ins a secret. However, when there is a problem with a cloud service, the event is widely reported causing the server huggers to raise red flags to leveraging any public cloud service.

4. Organizations who communicate cloud capabilities well will end up being successful in gaining customer awareness and eventual market share. The key to success is not just in having a cloud solution but in communicating the value proposition to business users. At the moment, the large focus is on data center optimization using cloud technologies that removes the attention of the benefit of business agility to organizations.

5. Infrastructure as a service will continue in the downward spiral towards becoming a commodity and differentiation will be based on cloud management capabilities. White box hardware with high availability being built into software is the game changer for leveraging infrastructure provided by cloud providers. However, this needs innovative cloud management capabilities built in to truly leverage the benefits of a shared infrastructure.

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