1. Virtualization and cloud management enters the mainstream – Organizations have well understood about the cost benefits and CapEx savings due to virtualization. With the increasing virtualization footprint in enterprises, the adoption of hybrid clouds will continue to grow in 2011. Organizations will realize true operational efficiencies and OpEx savings with comprehensive virtualization and cloud management solutions.
2. IT Automation will be key focus of Virtualization and Cloud solutions – Any company that has reached virtualization maturity needs automation tools for the virtual environment to gain any operational efficiency. Self-service provisioning, self-service management, automated monitoring, and automated dynamic reporting are some of the automated virtualization and cloud management capabilities organizations will be looking for.
3. Cost-effective, comprehensive and integrated cloud management capabilities will be key business solution differentiators. Large Enterprise IT teams are hesitant to move production applications into virtualization or cloud environments due to lack of visibility into performance and management issues. In 2011, Organizations will be looking for comprehensive management tools with broad functionality to support multiple virtual infrastructures. Customers will be looking for end-to-end comprehensive cloud infrastructure management with pre-integrated cloud suites.
4. Virtual storage and virtual network management will start catching up with virtual server management. Organizations will look for integrated infrastructure management encompassing virtual compute, virtual storage and virtual network resources. Application deployments in virtual or cloud environments must consider all three pillars of virtual infrastructure during the provisioning – compute, storage and network.
5. Multi-vendor hypervisor management solutions will prevail – Most organizations may need multiple virtualization vendors or multiple cloud providers to cover the entire application portfolio. So, organizations need flexibility to choose the virtualization vendor they want and a management solution to manage multiple virtualization vendors to avoid vendor lock-in risks.
6. Public clouds require the same security, governance and management tools as private clouds. The complexity and speed of technology will be key drivers for public cloud adoption. The single pane-of-glass and hybrid cloud management will be key desired capabilities to provide visibility, avoid vendor lock-ins, avoid integration overhead and to limit cloud sprawl.
7. Cloud compliance and governance will be key – Deployments that enter production environments without adequate policy adherence often do not meet the organization’s requirements. Organizations will look for advanced policy based provisioning capabilities to set and enforce policies easily to ensure compliance and governance.
8. Hosted private clouds will gain momentum – as most enterprises look towards managed hosting providers for cloud expansion and disaster recovery. Most organizations take time to transform their existing data centers to private clouds. Hosted private clouds will be good option to move into clouds without disturbing the existing data center architectures and infrastructure immediately.
9. Advanced capacity and cost management plays key role in managing and planning dynamic virtual and cloud environments - Organizations need comprehensive visibility into infrastructure resources consumption in real time for capacity planning. Business units must get the visibility about how much they are paying for resources and how much goes for unused, allowing them to optimize resource consumption and costs with chargeback capabilities.
10. Connected IT processes – The true barrier for the cloud adoption is not the technology, but the cultural shift in the way IT operates in traditional environments. The lines between IT silos will become blurry. IT can respond to business needs in real time by streamlining the organization’s entrenched silos and automating end to end service delivery processes.
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