2012 Prediction: FalconStor

Massive Increase in Virtualization Will Facilitate Service Migration to the Cloud

The cloud allows businesses to leverage shared infrastructure and a utility computing model that allows smaller organizations to access services that may be impossible for them to build and operate on their own. It also helps enterprises save costs by placing existing services offsite, reducing data center infrastructure expenses. The cloud conversation started 15 years ago with the “DOT COMs” when we started delivering applications as a web-based service.

In 2012, we will see a massive increase of virtualization adoption in the context of services migration into the cloud. The goal is to achieve an encapsulation of services to be migrated; this will be led by the virtualization of all layers of the infrastructure, applications, platforms, network and storage. Organizations that are more risk averse will go to a dedicated, secure yet outsourced cloud model, and this is where the delineation between the private, hybrid and public cloud will be best expressed. The model that organizations will end up going with is the result of assessing the two factors of risk verses cost.

Organizations will also begin to more seriously consider outsourcing some of their IT services to managed services providers (MSP), following a hybrid cloud model where a subset of their IT operations is cloud based. The best candidates for such a model are backup, disaster recovery (DR) and archiving operations.  Data management in general is the most costly of IT operations, and it requires a very specific and specialized set of skills that may not be accessible to smaller organizations.

The cloud delivers an abstraction model of IT services to improve efficiencies and service accessibility. We are now witnessing the maturation of the cloud-computing model as a viable alternative traditional IT infrastructure. The early applications of the cloud model have been very basic, especially when it comes to infrastructure clouds. The first models were dumb storage repositories that had very little to offer. In 2012, we will see these clouds become smarter. They will offer value-added services, such as basic recovery capability, or even full DR and operations failover to the cloud. Organizations will realize that the cloud can be a viable place to run their primary applications, accelerating the migration to the cloud movement. In other words, DR can become the gateway and the first step on your journey to the cloud.