Six Degrees Group 2015 Predictions
We are starting the year with our predictions of two major trends impact on IT departments.
2015 will see two major trends impact on IT departments: converged clouds and hybrid clouds. Often at the same time.
Converged clouds will grow in popularity as suppliers themselves evolve; the emergence of managed service providers with data, hosting and voice skills has enabled the creation of new solutions that merge IT and telecoms into a single holistic service.
Traditionally, organisations have moved IT resources into off-premise hosting environments but left phone systems in the comms cabinet in the office. In 2015 they will look to address this anomaly by standing up cloud platforms that can handle their IT (email, CRM, etc) as well as virtualised instances of call control and UC applications.
In a related move, hybrid clouds will become the norm as the industry accepts that organisations are never in a ‘one-size-fits-all’, uniform IT delivery model for anything, ever. IT will move at different speeds, in different places, for different reasons.
It will not be possible to move all production IT and comms equipment from one cloud to another (e.g. on-prem to off-prem) so they will look to work with suppliers who can handle hybrid models that allow peaceful coexistence between two or more modes of operation. Those suppliers must also be able to manage clouds across multiple vendors as well as platforms to enable smooth service migration, to maximise uptime and to handle workload-specific requirements like web server capacity bursting.
Finally, it will become commonplace for these two trends to come together to see the creation of hybrid clouds that contain a mix of non-real-time applications in parallel with streaming media and live collaboration, with the supply chain able to handle both challenges.
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