2015 Outlook For Enterprise Cloud Adoption

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Mike Kavis.

On a recent flight home after meeting with a large bank, I started reflecting on how the conversations about cloud computing with clients have changed over the last 12 to 24 months. In 2012 and 2013, a lot of the conversations where focused on “what is cloud computing,” “help us build a cloud strategy” or “how do we automate our infrastructure.” As we near the end of 2014 these conversations have changed drastically. Most progressive enterprises are knowledgeable about all of the different cloud service models (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS), have researched the major vendors, have started executing on their cloud strategy, and have become experts at managing the IaaS layer. The focus now appears to be moving up the stack towards the application layer.

2015: The year of cloud applications

Many enterprises have already laid the basic foundational work for their clouds and we’re seeing a mixture of private and public clouds being implemented with a high level of automation at the infrastructure layer. Enterprises have invested a lot of time into implementing guardrails around their clouds so that developers can consume the cloud services in a secure and compliant manner…

The “build it” part of the “build it and they will come” strategy is complete, now it is time to get the applications and the developers to join the party. I believe that 2015 will be the coming out party for PaaS. It remains to be seen if enterprises will buy into pure PaaS platforms, leverage PaaS capabilities via an IaaS provider, or roll their own by leveraging a collection of tools like Docker. I believe the answer is all of the above. Almost every account I go into, the client is either evaluating PaaS or doing a proof of concept with one or more PaaS platforms and their interest is far greater now than it was at the end of 2013…

Read more from the source @ http://www.forbes.com/sites/mikekavis/2014/11/04/2015-outlook-for-enterprise-cloud-adoption/