First a disclaimer: attempts to predict near-term developments in the tech arena often amount to fools' errands, ones that leave embarrassing documentation of the would-be prognosticator's ignorance.
That's under normal circumstances, and we're living through an era in which the buzzword is "disruption" for a reason - the tech world is currently experiencing a number of major ones, and most revolve around the tectonic shift that is cloud computing.
But we've got the insight to go ahead and take a stab at it anyway. Here's CRN US' top ten 2015 cloud predictions.
10. Security concerns become more concerning
If the Target and Home Depot breaches didn't instill enough anxiety, the Sony Pictures hack certainly did.
More businesses than ever are inclined to migrate critical data and workloads to public clouds, but the high-profile attacks have also left them more worried than ever.
The concerns are not entirely unfounded - mobile workforces and off-site computing are undermining traditional security measures like firewalls and anti-malware tools. What's the point of guarding your perimeter when most important activity, from data storage to user access, happens outside that perimeter?
Solution providers should be prepared to start every big cloud migration with a serious discussion about privacy and security. And partners of nontraditional vendors championing alternative approaches to security such as OpenDNS, FireLayers and Covata will see opportunities.
9. DevOps developments
Once there was IT infrastructure management, and there was application development, and the two were mostly considered non-overlapping magisteria.
But the cloud world has spawned the phenomena that is DevOps, and now applications are inextricably linked to the environments in which they are deployed.
These days, it's all about fast, agile, portable and resilient development, which is why platforms like Docker, Ansible, ElasticBox and Puppet have gotten so much attention in 2014, and why AWS recently introduced a DevOps certification.
Look for more vendors to come around offering solutions for automating time-intensive IT tasks and making it easier to provision, discover, manage and deploy applications on diverse platforms.
Next: the top eight cloud predictions
.png&h=142&w=230&c=1&s=1)
.png&w=100&c=1&s=0)
.png&h=298&w=480&c=1&s=1)
