Tumultuous 2020 Brings Revised Road Map for Cloud

A tumultuous 2020 is bringing big changes. In February, I shared a piece for Channel Futures that highlighted why 2020 would be a momentous year for containers, service mesh and cloud computing. Back then, nobody could have forecast today’s pandemic and its dramatic impact. Across all industries, it has changed the way consumers have digital experiences. And, it also made businesses realize their legacy IT infrastructure might not be able to keep pace with new demands.

Let’s revisit predictions from earlier in the year and map the changes.

Tumultuous 2020, What’s Changed

• Hybrid cloud becomes more important than ever. I believe cloud was the lifesaver of our industry during COVID-19’s disruption.

As more businesses make a leap to cloud, hybrid environments will be a critical focus area as IT organizations prepare themselves to better work and operate with clouds, but many applications continue to run on-premise. While I predicted that hybrid would be a crucial technology in 2020, I did not expect its rapid pace of adoption, which has become much faster.

More organizations will adopt a hybrid cloud approach sooner than expected, as they’ll have no other choice to keep up with technology’s aggressive evolution. In fact, Flexera’s annual State of the Cloud report found that 87% of businesses have a hybrid cloud strategy, using an average of 2.2 public clouds and 2.2 private clouds. They must run legacy workloads or local cloud on-premise while also deploying on public clouds and managing workloads there; this is from both a VM and Kubernetes perspective. Companies will rely heavily on their third-party service providers for this accelerated transformation. This means channel partners should be able to offer expert counsel on Red Hat, VMware, AWS and other major cloud leaders. They also will be looking more to their channel partners for counsel on cloud design, integration, migration and data center modernization.

As COVID-19 severely impacts IT teams’ time and budget, those who provide solutions that are easier to run and integrate will win this space. Simplicity, known skill sets and familiar products with shorter time to integrate will be critical.

Acceleration for Containers

• Container adoption should still run full-speed. In February, I predicted containers would become the de facto software packaging model, with application modernization taking an accelerated path. This still holds true today.

Container platforms have become an essential factor in the cloud landscape, accelerating cloud adoption in enterprises. Gartner predicts that by 2024, worldwide container management revenue will reach $944 million. Channel partners that can provide expertise in accelerating cloud-native transformation will become essential during this time. Many companies struggle with migrating legacy applications to the cloud. They also struggle with modernizing existing applications, and depend heavily on managed service providers (MSPs) for these capabilities. Despite the pandemic affecting day-to-day IT needs, the implementation of Kubernetes and container adoption are still priorities for businesses.

COVID-19 should not affect the adoption of containers for those already on a Kubernetes platform. Anyone who already started with Kubernetes uses containers already. And, organizations understand the value of Docker-based DevOps, local PC development and CI/CD pipelines based on containers.

More Changes

• Serverless computing adoption slows down. I expected a move toward maturing best practices, security solutions and tooling around serverless computing as more IT organizations implemented it. I saw AWS Outposts as the likely chief disruptor here. Why? Because It blurs the lines between on-cloud and on-premise workloads and services. This is with Google Anthos and Microsoft Azure as its main competition.

However, we can now assume that …