Expect faster adoption and more localization in a cloudy 2016

The growing maturity of the cloud has been one of the major trends of the past year and this is something that looks set to continue into next year.

There will be new challenges, however, and we've looked at what some of the industry's experts think the cloud will have in store for 2016.

Rohit Gupta, founder and CEO of cloud security specialist Palerra thinks APIs will gain in importance, "We expect to see cloud vendors selling APIs as new revenue streams. SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS vendors will be pressured to provide rich sets of APIs, enabling security vendors and application vendors to provide value added services".

The cloud may become more localized says Blazent's CTO, Michael Ludwig, "Increasing cloud adoption will push major cloud providers to consider regionalized service approaches due to network bandwidth concerns among enterprise customers". He also believes that self-service big data as a service (BdaaS) portals are going to make information and insights more readily available across the enterprise.

According to application performance specialist Riverbed, "More and more IT assets will be pushed into the cloud, and more users will work outside premises. We'll see more companies operate exclusively in the cloud, but enterprises will continue to leverage the hybrid cloud model with overall cloud usage increasing across the network". This will mean that organizations will need to look for solutions that provide greater visibility into performance, security and end-user experience for applications.

Marc Crespi, CEO and co-founder of OneCloud Software, expects the hybrid cloud to gain in importance, "In 2016 we are going to see accelerated adoption of hybrid cloud deployments because we will see more technologies that remove the barriers to leveraging public cloud. For example, these technologies will bring a simplified approach to creating a unified hybrid cloud management platform from disparate tools. The outcome will be a secure and scalable architecture that makes it possible for IT to add the public cloud to their 2016 plan".

Crespi also believes the cloud will change the disaster recovery industry, "With the cloud, disaster recovery doesn't take up any room and can be done affordably, simply and quickly. With the cloud, DR becomes a no brainer".

"The cloud office wars between Google and Microsoft will continue, but partners are going to need to support both suites in order to be successful, because it will become clear that both platforms serve specific market segments better than the other," says David Politis, CEO of BetterCloud. He also predicts that 2016 could become a golden age of IT. "This is the year when shadow IT will actually be embraced and seen as an opportunity to truly affect change in an organization. CIOs will be pushed to the cloud by their user populations, by their CEOs, and even by their boards as the market continues to produce success stories of organizations transforming the way they work by moving to the cloud".

Of course security issues impact on the cloud too and cyber security association ISACA predicts that, "Hackers will increasingly have cloud providers in their crosshairs, as organizations move more pervasively to cloud. This year we saw cloud providers take more responsibility for storing customer data. Because more data is shifting outside of organizations, 2016 will bring with it more attempts from cyber criminals to gain direct access to that pool of information".

Jeff Denworth, SVP of Marketing at cloud storage company CTERA expects that security concerns will have a positive effect, "IaaS will become more secure than an average private data center -- Amazon and AWS will elevate 'all-in' deal making to a feverish high. But in the meantime, just as organizations had dual-vendor strategies for IT hardware and software, this will emerge as a risk management policy for cloud operations".

The cloud then will continue to be a major factor in IT provision and we're likely to see more businesses moving away from running their own data centers to embrace an all-cloud future.

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