Apart from public, private and hybrid cloud computing, here are some of the emerging trends in cloud implementation consultation practices that are expected to rein the market in 2017. It is important for us to be aware of these as we endeavor to align our business strategies towards ensuring successful cloud implementation:
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Integrative management of multiple cloud service providers
We are in the times when one organization is likely to contract with multiple cloud service partners at a given point of time. In such a case, it becomes critical for that organization to be able to effectively manage the multiple cloud service providers together. This requires cloud management services that can take care of service integration, monitoring and management for a set of cloud services being availed by an organization. These can majorly include asset management for devices and infrastructure, management of key incidents and problems and the escalation thereof to a third party according to the need.
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The emergence of Cloud monitoring as a service (CMaaS)
With the growing use of hybrid cloud, cloud monitoring as a service is also getting more popular with the modern day organizations. This allows them to monitor and assess the performances of the multiple service providers that now become mutually dependent with their interdependency being critical to the IT service delivery of the client organization. For these services to function, it is important that these services be themselves independent of the service providers and yet can avail access to the cloud services from either the service providers or the organizations at their end can ensure their access to the services. CMaaS can help you monitor hosted and private cloud services as well as the in-house environments apart from providing integration with public cloud services, IaaS and PaaS for monitoring and performance assessment purposes.
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Ability to switch between different cloud platforms & service providers
With the surge in popularity of cloud services, the organizations will also like to switch the work-loads between different cloud service providers which will let them compare these services and understand the individual advantages of these different service offerings. This will also help them enjoy competitive pricing on these services. This requires the organizations to be able to design their custom cloud services that give them the flexibility to be catered on multiple platforms by multiple service providers without any impact on the efficacy of the currently availed services and without any time-lag.
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Auditing the cloud services and security levels
The advent of the forthcoming GDPR regulations is an indication that it will become even more important to have well-defined data security policies, procedures and practices for the service providers, if they need to gain trust of their potential clients. All this will be must when the regulators would conduct an audit of their services. Also, the organizations will become better equipped to assess the service quality of their potential cloud services providers with a closer evaluation of their governance and data security policies. So, moving data over the cloud will only make the security issues more critical making the service providers more responsible for the delivery of information security that is up to the mark and need for auditing the service provider to ensure implementation of the required security levels.
Apart from these, with the evolution of the cloud services, we hope to witness emergence of new cloud service categories that would be designed to address to specific issues. So, with growth in the scale and potential of the cloud services, many new applications are expected to emerge that will enable this development. Some of these applications can be targeted at niche audiences, while some others might be meant to deal with more common issues. Regardless of the many new developments in the cloud industry, we are looking forward to, we are sure that the future for cloud infrastructure and cloud services is as bright as it can be in 2017.
