And finally, what can we expect this year?

Cloud is business, not technology

The recent announcements from Oracle about the company offering a range of cloud service alternatives – from IaaS to SaaS – all geared around its own well-established database and applications suite, is a good indicator of a trend that I expect to come more obvious as 2014 progresses. Namely, the way business-centric factors will become the key driver of customer decision making when it comes to cloud services.

This is likely to manifest itself in a number of ways. For example, the track record of companies like Oracle are well known, as are some of the downsides when it comes to large section of the total possible marketplace for its products – commonly referred to as the small to medium-sized business community. Having the technology deliverable as SaaS, and focused to their needs by specialist channel partners, is likely to be a sizable lever on the decision making on cloud services by such companies.

It will also show up in trends expected in 2014 by the likes of Riverbed and Rackspace. Riverbed has predicted a far more flexible approach to the use of cloud which, again, shows a breakaway from the technology- stack orientation that tends to such a single type of cloud as THE solution. Instead, it sees tasks being allocated to the most appropriate platform as appropriate. And that is not just matching the typical requirements of a task and allocating resources to it. It will increasingly become possible that a task can run in a multi-tenanted public service most of the time, yet need to be moved to dedicated bare metal hosted environment on occasions, or even back on-premise,  if the workload requires it. 

A similar issue is seen by Rackspace in the emergence of many different specialised cloud services. Here, smaller cloud service providers are expected to appear that focus on the needs of definable market segments. This is already starting to happen with the emergence of businesses offering services based around Microsoft Office.

These mark the emergence of service aggregation as an `industry sector’ within cloud services – essentially providing the `Service Aggregation as a Cloud (SAaaC)’ service.

Red Hat and its predictions of OpenStack everywhere would seem to go against this trend by suggesting that a technology solution is the most important component. But in practice, the level of flexibility and agility that is required from service providers offering a real business-solutions orientation  will have to be built on some level of commonality. If there is to be effective collaboration it will require some common ground.

SDE (Software Defined Everything)

Contributing to this diminution of technology as the driving force of cloud will be the software definition of everything.

Software Defined Networks and Datacentres (SDNs and SDDCs) are already becoming established, but the model is being extended. By the end of 2014 it will be increasingly likely that business users will look at compute resources - be they on-premise or hosted with a CSP - as a palate on which they mix their `services colours' or a blank canvas on which they paint their `business vision'. The resources will be dynamically defined and optimised by software, rather than engineered as a virtual but rigid structure. This will not only give users far more flexibility and agility - as well as greater granularity in defining their requirements - but also help MSPs utilise their resources more cost-effectively, and give them a service to sell.

The Rise of the Data Scientist

As pointed out by CA Technologies, skills shortages will be continue to be an issue over the coming year, not only because of a structural weakness in education, but also because the skills requirement is changing. Take, for example, the growing need for data scientists.

The hot topic of 2013 was big data analytics, but it has already raised doubts about whether it makes life better or worse. If businesses don't know what questions to really ask of the vast amounts of data they are producing, the chances are they are going to be worse off than before because they are unlikely to ask the questions that produce real business value. They may even `analyse' themselves down blind alleys that waste time and cost money.

So there is a growing realisation that businesses need an additional resource if they are to exploit the data as best as possible, and that is access to data scientists. These are the people who understand data and the relationships between different datasets. They also have the skills to identify what answers a business is actually searching for, and from that, what questions really need to asked in the analysis process.

The demand is likely to lead to the growth of data science consultancies that are able to help those businesses that do not require (or cannot afford) full time specialists.

The Internet of Things

This is certain to be a major market development during 2014, with the biggest issue being the limitless applications possibility that can be opened up. This will be an area where the specialist skills and expertise of the channel partner community should really come into their own. They will be the ones most likely to have to domain skills needed to help customers identify what `things' need to included in future systems, and to help in building the solutions for them.

BYOD becomes HSFTL or maybe WGADUWYL

Bring Your Own Device, while by no means universal yet, is becoming like a glacier, pushing all in front of it. But 2014 will see general acceptance of it, to the point where the business model will become HSFTL for those companies that still need some measure of control over what is used – HSFTL stands for  `Have Something From This List’, by the way.

For the more cavalier businesses we can expect to see WGADUWYL (Who Gives A Damn, Use What You Like) take hold. And as integration tools, together with security tools, services and Policy-led management of security become more mature and comprehensive, this latter option will in fact become far more easy to manage and integrate into rich, collaborative environments.

Different approaches to security

There are still many issues surrounding security and the cloud, if only because many of the traditional technology solutions that work with on-premise installations are simply inadequate, or at best unsuitable, for cloud environments. So 2014 could well be the year that new approaches, as well as new technologies, come into play.

Policy-led business management and automation  is by no means new, but 2014 should see business processes being increasingly automated through the use of policy-led management tools. Such tools will become the lynch-pin for most other business applications, the processes of which will be controlled by the policy management tools. In security, this is likely to manifest itself as self-defence policies that each data item carries with it. The bottom line here will be giving the data item the tools needed to answer the question: `is it right, correct and proper that this received instruction is executed?’ If not, will have powers to block, not respond or, in a worst case scenario, self-destruct.

When it comes to new security technologies, the main one being talked about is homomorphic encryption. This, in essence, allows source data provided by different services to be pooled into a deliverable result of some kind which is then available to another party. The source data, however, is masked and cannot be determined or uncovered however.

This could be particularly relevant to the development of cloud delivered services, for it would allow the chaining together of different services to produce a service required by an end customer, without exposing the confidential data within each service provider. It is still early days for this technology, but if it does allow service providers to partner up to deliver complex services with some degree of confidence it could provide an important breakthrough for cloud services.