Enterprises are paying a lot more attention to the cloud these days—particularly to Amazon Web Services, which still leads the thinking in the public cloud. AWS’s Re:Invent conference is next month, and I expect to see three new types of cloud offerings emerge that will be of strong interest to enterprise.
Policy-based cloud resource governance
Policy-based cloud resource governance is the ability to place governing rules around cloud-based resources, such as storage, compute, security, and APIs. Count on a lot of partner-driven tech that fits into this category, as well as some offerings from AWS itself.
The use cases for governance were not obvious when we only had 100 to 500 resources to govern. Now with most enterprises managing more than 10,000—and that’s with only 20 percent of their workloads in the cloud—the need is obvious.
Proactive cloud security
Proactive cloud security is the ability for security systems to act dynamically to react to threats and breach attempts. AWS and other public cloud providers know that advanced security is the only way that enterprises will truly trust the cloud, so count on AWS or its partners to stay a few steps ahead of the demand by using automated approaches.
The objective here is simple: Provide cloud security in which workloads and data in the public cloud is more secure than workloads sitting in the enterprise datacenters. The recent breaches at Equifax and several government agencies are proof that having workloads on premises does not protect you from hackers.
Smart cloud management
Smart cloud management is about dynamic and automated responses to management-related tasks, such as performance that’s falling out of the SLA ranges, cloud performance management, resource management, and cost and billing management.
The existing set of tools, while good, can be better. I’m not the only one who sees this as a gap, and you can count on AWS and its partners to fill this gap quickly. Microsoft and Google will have their solutions as well.