2014 Cloud & tech predictions from the CohesiveFT team

From Director of Engineering, Nicholas Clements

General levels of paranoia under the guise of national security will continue to rise.
A non-US cloud company (or a US cloud company that properly separates its divisions based on geographical location) will experience significant growth on the international level, taking advantage of the US' one-sided view of security and legal processes. It will not trump Amazon's market share yet, but it will become a visible threat.

Personal use of cloud storage will increase leading to a doomsday scenario whereby many people will trust that the cloud is the best approach to backing up their data only to find that they've lost all of their pictures and (probably illegally downloaded) movies and music when their cloud storage of choice has a catastrophic failure. This will prove that depending on a single form of backup is still a terrible idea. (Probably more like 2016.)

From Director of Products and Marketing, Ryan Koop

Cloud purchase decisions will become more geo-focused rather than price or feature focused. After access to virtual compute, virtual storage and underlying network needs are accommodated, customers will then look to the providers' geographic presence when making deployment choices. The cloud market is getting crowded and this is a good thing for end users. The right set of global points of presence that line up with a customer's application or business needs will add more value than various provider services on top of the cloud offering. Shortening the network distance to end users (both internal and external) will be the primary driver behind hybrid cloud.
Amazon US East 1 will have a major outage - I'm just playing the numbers here, IMHO they still run the best cloud out there... Happy to make the book if anyone is interested.
The AWS ecosystem will continue to drive the AWS roadmap. Now that Workspaces has targeted AWS Global Solution Provider Citrix, who is next? Amazon Web Services CRM? That would get two birds...

From CTO Chris Swan

The OpenStack foundation will realise the need to shift focus from features to installation and supportability. The back end of 2013 is seeing the first OpenStack public clouds migrating from Folsom to Grizzly, which already puts them a release behind the leading edge. Something like the Ubuntu long term support (LTS) release cycle will be needed to give adopters much needed stability.

A sub micro instance marketplace based on Docker or similar lightweight container mechanisms will burst onto the scene. Pundits will argue endlessly with each other about whether to label it IaaS or PaaS. Meanwhile a sub 1c/day price of entry will cause a whole new flood of adoption and innovation.

Containerization approaches like Docker disrupt full OS virtualization and will change the competitive landscape. Discuss #cloud
— Ben Kepes (@benkepes) December 4, 2013

From Marcy Malagon, Business Development & Communications Strategy

Customer demand will be in software defined everything…
There will be a boom of women in technology (finally)
The rise of more aware machines will really begin in 2014 …"The Terminator" is starting to feel more plausible as we will see an increase of the different types of devices connecting to internet.
Most over rated thing in 2014: the cost of higher education in the US
Nerd alert! Developers continue to be in high demand and become as hot as "sport stars"

From CohesiveFT partner, Abiquo
Ian Finlay, VP of Products

In 2013 we saw a sharp decline in hardware revenues for the channel due to users increasingly using the public cloud for compute and storage. This is backed by Gartner which recently reported a drastic decline in the number of servers sold in EMEA throughout Q3. Because of this, we are seeing traditional hardware resellers look to transition their business, working towards becoming cloud service providers; providing service based offerings, instead of traditional hardware and kit.

There have been many predictions around the rise of the hybrid cloud model and quite frankly, it hasn’t taken off. Yes, we saw users start to embrace a mixture of cloud models, i.e. use half public and half private cloud or hybrid multi-provider cloud, but not the hybrid model that many had predicted. What we have seen and will continue to see is users choosing where to put critical resource – and interestingly, we’re seeing more and more opt for public cloud.
In my opinion, the idea of the hybrid cloud isn’t going to be a question of on or off premise, private or public cloud. It’s going to concern the use of multiple clouds and the challenge will be how to manage and control all of them from one centralised point of view.

The future of cloud services:

Consumer-based services: This year we saw an increase in consumer-based cloud services built on public clouds and no doubt we will see even more arise in 2014. It’s a way for service providers to offer application services to customers without having to build infrastructure and incur large setup costs. Consumers already trust these application providers with their personal data to a point, and we expect these services to penetrate the corporate market on the back of employees’ personal use.

Corporate/enterprise-based services: In terms of corporate/enterprise-based cloud services, we will see service providers start to offer something which looks more like an SLA rather than a technology solution. Nowadays, businesses want to buy outcomes, rather than technology. They will still want to know more about the delivery aspect, reliability, compliance elements, find out their disaster recovery and backup options from the outset to verify that the SLA is realistic. The challenge for the service providers will be in designing services that match this new demand.

The importance of trust

Trust is the foundation of business and always will be. Customers want to trust the person or provider they are buying a service from. The more they trust a provider, the more critical the applications they will be willing to outsource, and the more they will be prepared to spend. Therefore service providers will have to up their game in building that trust by being transparent and getting closer to the customer’s business needs.

The changing role of IT and the IT dept.

One of the challenges for IT departments today is that end users have built an expectation of quality, style and interaction from the consumer market and now expect same experiences at work. They expect systems and processes to be easy and intuitive and to just work. The IT department will have to change roles to become enablers in order to meet this new expectation and demand. The problem is, is that tools to get the job done, so to speak and they are changing. Where the IT department is used to having control over technology and be hands on, they are now expected to have the same control over non-physical technologies, cloud-based systems and processes. A new technical expertise and skill set is required and the IT department will need to embrace this.

From Dwight Koop, COO

AWS will not increase prices to match the competition.

Yes its true, AWS prices are just too good to be true. In spite of the massive marketing campaign by the incumbents in the technology sector justifying their higher prices, Amazon will be too stubborn to increase its prices to match others’. This, of course, will force many enterprise shops to stick with their over priced incumbent providers, because a move to EC2 would require answering the question, "why didn't go to IaaS and AWS 5 years ago." Oddly enough, it is easier to hide behind higher prices.

From Sam Mitchell, Senior Solution Architect

2014 will see a strong adoption of Virtual Network Services provided by a new breed of virtual telcos called VNOs (Virtual Network Operators).

Traditional telcos have been slow to respond, but enterprise customers will lead them to cloud-based offerings to stay current. The enterprise will adopt the new VNO trend quickly, but then panic toward 2015. The potential solution will survive the initial hesitations. Enterprises know they need secure, dedicated lines, and telco vendors will eventually figure out a new way to deliver something like a leased lines that's built as an overlay on top of third party networks.