CloudCheckr Predictions for the Nebulous New Year

We may be heading into the new year with a laundry list of new features to develop for since AWS re:Invent last month—but we’ve also given a fair bit of thought to changes happening across the broader cloud computing landscape. Our CTO Patrick shares a few of his thoughts and predictions below.

Mind shift leads to momentum

“I think what’s started to happen is there has been a shift in thinking about cloud deployments: the question isn’t ‘Can we even move this to the cloud?’ but ‘How are we going to optimize our workloads to take advantage of all the native services available in the cloud?’” Patrick notes. We expect new footprints, as well as expanding footprints, from organizations that may not have considered it 2 years ago, even. As more people shift things off-premise and into the cloud, they’ve seen that the cloud is a huge opportunity to optimize operations by leveraging the full suite of services offered to them.

One thing to attribute this massive shift to is the ability for “button click migrations”: where migrations used to be a highly considered, time-consuming process, there are now myriad partners that can help increase the speed and ease of adoption. The introduction of AWS Migration Competency earlier this year has truly pushed the momentum of migrations to a new level—and it will only increase in velocity as we head into 2017. While AWS has taken the lead, Azure, Google, and other CSPs are right on their heels.

Sophisticated solutions from MSPs and resellers

Managed Service Providers and resellers in the cloud space will immediately recognize increased demands from clients continuing their cloud journey. MSPs have already begun to find new ways to evolve and grow their AWS practice on behalf of their Enterprise client needs.

At this point, companies moving to the cloud (or on the cloud) expect more sophisticated solutions to take their raw data to the next level. MSPs and resellers need to be able to handle that efficiently to provide a good customer experience for their clients. Things like automation, more actionable insights, and white labeling will become more broadly accessible to simplify cloud complexity.

Efficiency and security as a competitive edge

Now is the time that Enterprise companies will gain traction with cloud usage as a true business strategy; beyond justifying it, they’ve started to see which functions work best in the cloud to reach new levels of operational efficiency.

Across the board, organizations will be more focused on automating security and compliance standards for their ecosystem. Particularly as auditors become more familiar with the cloud, the need to integrate best practice checks and daily reports about security mitigation will be crucial.

Government growth continues

Although they’ve been slow to join the party, government agencies are continuing to forge ahead on their move to the cloud. As more agencies see that the cloud can meet government-wide contract requirements and compliance standards, their focus now moves to how to obtain next stages of approvals within their organization. Concerns about compliance and security that have previously delayed government cloud usage will be less and less of an issue as we move into the new year.

The cloud is no longer the wild west—automation and optimization will be the key to taming it. Organizations across the board, from MSP to government or startup to enterprise, are seeing the need for more comprehensive, unified solutions to make the most of their cloud investment.

Reach out to discuss how your organization can leverage CloudCheckr to grow fast and stay safe in the cloud in 2017 and beyond.