2017 is drawing to a close. Sadly, I was greeted with the news of Oracle laying off their storage hardware sales team yesterday. And I couldn’t help to see where all this is going, the Oracle Cloud. The cloud has become the data services platform of choice, not on-premise storage infrastructure anymore.
Years ago, when I first started blogging, I wrote that Cloud Computing could make you lose your job unless… I don’t usually make predictions but that prediction in 2011 is becoming true and more prevalent.
What is the future looking like?
For one, it is not bleak and plenty to look forward to. Forrester predicts that in 2018 (or at the end of it), Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google will capture 76% of all cloud platform revenue and 80% by 2020. More data will be generated at the edge than it is being created centrally on public clouds. The demand for high performance data services platforms will be beyond your usual object-based storage and having a data singularity where data can transcend across premises will become crucial in maintaining, extending and improving the services from core-to-edge. Multi-Cloud or Cross-Cloud services platforms are maturing because the cloud platform space, while dominated by AWS, Azure and Google, includes IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Rackspace, Alibaba Cloud, and is also about localized and regionalized players like Markely, Virtustream and ReScale serving unique and niche markets.
To address this shift, data services platforms are reinventing itself to be different. Flash-based, NVMe storage (err, I mean data services platform) is the foundation of building and drive self-service analytics, whether it is file-aware or content-aware, or infrastructure-aware. This new found “awareness” would inculcate platform intelligence and data intelligence, driving automation towards predictive and preemptive actions.
From a security point of view, data privacy and data governance take precedence of form and shape. As Europe enforces the General Data Protection Regulation in May of 2018, the proliferation of multi-clouds and cross-clouds will be questions. How safe is my organization’s data? How will it be regulated as the data crosses cloud boundaries? How to ensure that data workflows and pipelines move freely to shared and unencumbered? These questions are surely be eyeballed in any data regulated segments of the businesses and the individuals who have dealings in those markets.
What about people like us who have been in the storage technology industry for a lot time? I have reverberated that a technology person doing technical work has stand out. Going back to my old 2011 blog, you have to be better than better, knowing the technologies deeper than deeper, and be more connected than you are connected right now. Be EXTRAORDINARY than the typical run-of-the-mill engineer or consultant or architect. Stand Out!
This is not a prediction for the future. I am not a futurist but the signs of change upon the data services platforms (storage for you dinosaurs, yours truly included) are shaping up to tangible forms. And we are going to see lots of more disruptive stuff in 2018 and beyond.
Just my once-in-a-while ranting and we will have a fantastic 2018!
