OREANDA-NEWS. January 12, 2016. This is the second in a series of blogs about IDC’s report, “FutureScape: Worldwide Cloud 2016 Predictions-Mastering the Raw Material of Digital Transformation .” The first addressed the acceleration in digital transformation and cloud disruption during the next two years. This article addresses the tools, standards and processes IT will leverage to manage and develop cloud services during this disruptive phase.

By 2017, More Than 60% of Enterprise IT Organizations Building Hybrid Clouds Will Purchase New or Updated Workload-Centric Cloud Management Solutions

In the beginning, IT management was about the system, server and network. Then came composite Web applications, and the focus of management moved to application performance. With cloud disruption, it’s all about end-to-end management of workloads in a hybrid cloud environment. Cloud management platforms will have to be very “workload aware” to deliver the performance, availability, optimization and IT operations analytics organizations will demand to track cloud service level agreements (SLAs) and solve end-user issues. Increasingly, these management systems will link with business impact dashboards and policy-based orchestration engines. Many will run as SaaS solutions themselves. IT will spend the next few years defining standard service definitions, policies and SLAs.

By 2017, Over 60% of Enterprises Will Embrace Open Source and Open APIs as the Underpinning for Cloud Integration Strategies

Open source standards and open APIs will drive the integration and shifting of workloads across public, hybrid and private clouds, as well as their end-to-end optimization and management. OpenStack, Cloud Foundry and Docker will most likely become standard across cloud types and tiers. Open APIs will enable the data exchanges required for cloud monetization. Gradually, vendors will be forced to embrace openness or lose out to those that do.

By 2018, Over 60% of New Apps Will Use Cloud-Enabled Continuous Delivery and Cloud-Native Application Architectures to Enable Faster Innovation and Business Agility

In a multi-cloud environment, development will leverage DevOps and cloud native, microservice-based architectures and environments. DevOps will demand self-service tools for configuration, provisioning and lifecycle management of development platforms and infrastructures in order to create, update and move applications rapidly from concept to production ̶ without any downtime or disruption. DevOps will also force IT to integrate and partner with the business more than it ever has before.

This mobile, collaborative, cloud-centric development and management environment will depend on an Interconnection Oriented Architecture™ (IOA™) that can deliver the bandwidth, low latency and security necessary for smooth workload migration and end-to-end real-time management and collaboration. Much of an IOA can play out in colocation centers where cloud players, developers, users and providers interconnect proximately and directly at high speed for faster, more productive interactions. The Equinix Cloud Exchange can establish virtual connections to multiple clouds via a single network port, making it a key multi-cloud enabler that helps organizations match and provision workloads with the best services. The Cloud Exchange also offers an accessible API and portal for fast integration of multiple public cloud services into enterprise hybrid environments plus robust cloud provider support to help them meet their customer performance and service SLAs. And with an ecosystem of more than 500 cloud service providers, Equinix is the best place to find the right cloud service to match any type of workload.

The next blog in this series will discuss how the industry is moving from cloud disruption and management to cloud-driven IT transformation.