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How to Prepare for the Future of the Cloud

Steve Francis

How do enterprises prepare for the future that our Cloud Vision 2020 survey forecasts? I see three immediate takeaways to focus on:

Start with: 3 Lessons About the Future of the Cloud

1. Visibility

You cannot manage what you cannot see. Yet, with your workloads split among on-premises, public, private and hybrid clouds, visibility is difficult to achieve.

Are your workloads available? Are they performing properly? Are you about to run out of a specific resource, such as storage? These are the kind of questions you need to answer to manage your computing fabric.

You need monitoring tools to do this, of course. If you're managing a diverse hybrid infrastructure, you need a monitoring partner that can handle the entire range of platforms — on-premises, public, private and hybrid cloud.

2. Build Your Staff's Skillsets

Think of the journey you are taking. Five years ago, most of your workloads were on-premises. Five years from now most will be in the cloud. That changes everything — your infrastructure, your management tools and how you develop applications.

While you are busy building this exciting new future, make sure you set aside time and money to train your staff for the key skills they'll need to help you get there. This includes how best to deploy and manage workloads in public clouds such as AWS, how to implement a successful DevOps culture, and how to deploy and manage the monitoring tools you'll need to keep everything running smoothly.

3. Choose Your Public Cloud Vendor Carefully

AWS has a commanding lead, but it is far from the only game in town. Start by taking stock of what you need from a cloud partner. Are you looking for public cloud service to provide a full development stack? Or is cloud just a place to stage data? Do a thorough inventory of what you need from a public cloud vendor and compare the major options. Amazon, Microsoft and Google are quite different, and there is no one-size-fits-all in public cloud. Investigate whether you want to jump fully into a cloud provider and take advantage of all their services (database-as-a-service, queuing systems, etc.), or try to remain cloud neutral, and use tools like Kubernetes to manage workloads — possibly even across multiple clouds.

Summary

Enterprises are in the middle of a massive transition, akin to a fourth industrial revolution. It's worthwhile to consider where you'll be in the near future and make plans to ensure you're prepared when you get there.

Hot Topics

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...

How to Prepare for the Future of the Cloud

Steve Francis

How do enterprises prepare for the future that our Cloud Vision 2020 survey forecasts? I see three immediate takeaways to focus on:

Start with: 3 Lessons About the Future of the Cloud

1. Visibility

You cannot manage what you cannot see. Yet, with your workloads split among on-premises, public, private and hybrid clouds, visibility is difficult to achieve.

Are your workloads available? Are they performing properly? Are you about to run out of a specific resource, such as storage? These are the kind of questions you need to answer to manage your computing fabric.

You need monitoring tools to do this, of course. If you're managing a diverse hybrid infrastructure, you need a monitoring partner that can handle the entire range of platforms — on-premises, public, private and hybrid cloud.

2. Build Your Staff's Skillsets

Think of the journey you are taking. Five years ago, most of your workloads were on-premises. Five years from now most will be in the cloud. That changes everything — your infrastructure, your management tools and how you develop applications.

While you are busy building this exciting new future, make sure you set aside time and money to train your staff for the key skills they'll need to help you get there. This includes how best to deploy and manage workloads in public clouds such as AWS, how to implement a successful DevOps culture, and how to deploy and manage the monitoring tools you'll need to keep everything running smoothly.

3. Choose Your Public Cloud Vendor Carefully

AWS has a commanding lead, but it is far from the only game in town. Start by taking stock of what you need from a cloud partner. Are you looking for public cloud service to provide a full development stack? Or is cloud just a place to stage data? Do a thorough inventory of what you need from a public cloud vendor and compare the major options. Amazon, Microsoft and Google are quite different, and there is no one-size-fits-all in public cloud. Investigate whether you want to jump fully into a cloud provider and take advantage of all their services (database-as-a-service, queuing systems, etc.), or try to remain cloud neutral, and use tools like Kubernetes to manage workloads — possibly even across multiple clouds.

Summary

Enterprises are in the middle of a massive transition, akin to a fourth industrial revolution. It's worthwhile to consider where you'll be in the near future and make plans to ensure you're prepared when you get there.

Hot Topics

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...