Welcome to 2017. It’s a new year. We have a new president. So let’s take a look at what some folks are saying about what happened in 2016 and what to expect in the year ahead.
Industry analysts Ovum (News - Alert) in a recent paper said machine learning will be the single biggest disruptor for big data analytics this year. It said “in most cases, machine learning will be embedded in applications and services rather than custom-developed because few organizations outside the Global 2000 (or digital online businesses) will have data scientists on their staff.”
But for those that do have data scientists, Ovum said, there will be a major effort to make data science a top priority at many businesses.
Ovum also noted that the Internet of Things, for which some applications will need to support real-time streaming analytics, will be a major big data driver in 2017.
In a separate Ovum piece, Roy Illsley recently ruminated about how a Trump presidency could impact public cloud computing. He noted the the public cloud market in Asia is expanding, with 70 percent of those surveyed indicating plans to use the public cloud by 2018. Meanwhile, he wrote, the U.S. public cloud market is larger, yet more mature.
“The rhetoric coming from President-elect Trump is that it will be an America-first approach to trade and business,” he wrote. “While this appears to be aimed at the manufacturing sector, cloud computing could become caught up in a global retrenchment to a nationalistic approach to business by other countries in response.
“From a cloud computing perspective, this response would not be difficult to act upon as data protection and privacy laws could be used to force in-country data residency,” he continued. “The impact on the global public cloud providers would be that while in Western economies their growth may be relatively unaffected, in the emerging economies, where they do not have a direct presence, tier-2 service providers using OpenStack to offer public in-country cloud services could expand and challenge their position.”
Cloud leaders Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and IBM (News - Alert) SoftLayer are the key companies that would be challenged in that scenario, of course. Speaking of AWS, Tech Republic recently reported that the cloud pioneer at the recent 2016 Structure Conference in San Francisco explained it would continue to grow and innovate in the next decade.
That strategy, the piece reported, involves understanding how customers use the cloud. For example, the piece noted that development and test environments tend to be first to move to the cloud. It also talked about how AWS discussed the proliferation of cloud-based commercial applications, including apps at Major League Baseball stadiums that leverages AWS to track baseball movements and statistics, and display them on live TV. And it noted that a wide variety of industry verticals, including the security-sensitive finance sector (and, as an example, Capital One), are leveraging the cloud.
Meanwhile, Cisco (News - Alert) recently unveiled the findings of its sixth annual Global Cloud Index report. Here are some of the key findings:
- cloud traffic will nearly quadruple to 92 percent of total data center traffic, with the remaining 8 percent processed in traditional data centers;
- public cloud (68 percent) will grow faster than private cloud (32 percent);
- database/analytics/Internet of Things workloads will account for 22 percent of total business workloads, compared to 20 percent in 2015;
- business workloads will grow 2.4 fold and consumer workloads will grow 3.5 fold, increasing from 21 to 28 percent of total workloads; and
- video and social networking will lead the increase in consumer workloads, accounting for 34 percent of total consumer workloads.
Cisco also looked at hyperscale data centers. And it said they would grow from 259 to 285 by 2020, with traffic projected to quintuple.
“In the six years of this study, cloud computing has advanced from an emerging technology to an essential scalable and flexible part of architecture for service providers of all types around the globe,” said Doug Webster, vice president of service provider marketing, Cisco. “Powered by video, IoT, SDN/NFV, and more, we forecast this significant cloud migration and the increased amount of network traffic generated as a result to continue at a rapid rate as operators streamline infrastructures to help them more profitably deliver IP-based services businesses and consumers alike.”
Edited by Alicia Young
