Transformation of business processes has been the biggest impact of cloud computing over last half decade. In the second phase of cloud growth, more and more businesses are looking for ways to enrich their customer offerings by scaling their cloud hosting resources, thus further accelerating cloud growth through 2017.

Bigger enterprises that own huge data centers and are backed by substantial budgets to run complex and high end applications have begun to appreciate and look at cloud as a practicable place for operating vital business processes.

In North America, more than half of 1,000 plus IT driven enterprises are adopting hybrid model of cloud while almost 38 percent organizations building private clouds. There are many factors that will influence shape of cloud in 2017 and according to Forrester the major impact of the change will be visible in following ways.

Big cloud providers to be backed by regional players

As more and more enterprises begin to realize the huge costs and time factor involved in acquiring private cloud capabilities, these players will shift to public cloud. On can realize this by understanding how Capital One abandoned its efforts of setting up own private cloud due to significant investment in time, efforts, energy, and bandwidth. The organization found that similar infrastructure was available in the form of AWS in much better state.

The mega cloud provider entities including IBM, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon.com contribute a lion’s share in the growth of global public market, which is projected to touch $146 million by 2017. This market has been growing at CAGR of 22 percent with turnover of $97 million in 2015. The growth will be compounded by opening of multiple data centers by the mega cloud providers.

One must appreciate that these players will not be practically able to support customers by servicing every unique request, thus leaving a major portion of opportunities open for the regional players. Therefore enterprises need to be open to the idea of using multiple providers.

Cloud cost control

Ability of IT executives to contain loud costs will improve with maturing of their best practices. This will be backed by cost management tools being developed by mega cloud players. Cloud costs will be kept under control in 2017. Organizations will also benefits to the large extent by tools such as Cloudin or Cloudability developed by cloud players.

Migration tools to boost cloud adoption

It is recommended that refractor apps of organizations should utilize migration services for running on public cloud systems. This is a better strategy than just pushing the existing apps into public cloud.

Cloud has an amazing elasticity and the same can be leveraged for rewriting the application in order to move it. These lift and shift migration will influence cloud adoption in spite of cost factor.

Shift to Hyperconverged Cloud Infrastructure (HCI)

Security of sensitive data cannot be fully guaranteed by public cloud systems and therefore some organizations feel the need for private cloud services. It is observed that building private cloud resources is a complex and time consuming process that requires integration of automation, advanced virtualization, resource monitoring, self service access, among other factors. This can be an overwhelming task.

This is where Hyperconverged Cloud Infrastructure (HCI) comes into play. Organizations can leverage pre-integrated resources of storage and compute power for accelerating their cloud implementations. HCI has potential to act as a robust foundation for development of an organization’s private cloud capability. It is no wonder that HCI is rapidly gaining an acceptance as a default infrastructure platform for building the hybrid cloud’s private component.

Containers to simplify development

Development of Linux containers will enable developers to manage software code for developing cloud apps. These containers will be extensively available and consumed by directly by developers for building their individual stacks to facilitate development of micro-services. This will naturally lead to managing new issues that are consequent to a new development such as monitoring, storage, security, and networking related challenges.

Public cloud to host critical apps

The growing level of comfort in public cloud environment will boost confidence of CIOs to implement enterprise apps in public cloud.