For many of us laboring in the fields of digital transformation, 2017 was a year of high-intensity work and high-reward achievement. So we’re looking forward to a little breather over the end-of-year holiday season.
But we’re going to have to get right back on the Continuous Delivery bullet train in 2018. Markets move too fast and customer expectations elevate too precipitously for businesses to rest on their laurels.
Here’s a DevOps “to-do list” for 2018 that should be priorities for anyone who wants to make sure their organization is running at the front of the digital pack through next year – and beyond.

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The global cloud computing market is now worth $180 billion in vendor revenues with the market still growing by 24% annually, according to the latest note from Synergy Research.

The industry is put into six different buckets. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS), the first, remains the fastest growing sector, with 47% growth, and – as this publication has long since explored – Amazon and Microsoft at the top of the tree. The second fastest growing area was enterprise software as a service (SaaS), at 31%, with Microsoft and Salesforce the leading vendors.

The weakest growing areas were private and public cloud, led by Dell EMC/HPE and Cisco/Dell EMC respectively, while unified communications as a service (UCaaS) gained just over 20% annual growth, with RingCentral and Mitel the leading vendors, and hosted private cloud hit almost 30% led by IBM and Rackspace.

“We tagged 2015 as the year when cloud became mainstream and 2016 as the year when cloud started to dominate many IT market segments. In 2017, cloud was the new normal,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy.

“Major barriers to cloud adoption are now almost a thing of the past, with previously perceived weaknesses such as security now often seen as strengths,” Dinsdale added.

“Cloud technologies are now generating massive revenues for cloud service providers and technology vendors and we forecast that current market growth rates will decline only slowly over the next five years.”

Synergy has obviously been busy during the end of year break, issuing three research notes this week. According to their analysis, the data centre market saw record mergers and acquisitions in 2017, ahead of 2015 and 2016’s totals combined, while hosted cloud and collaboration revenues remain the quickest growing area of enterprise IT infrastructure.

With 73% of businesses having had some type of operations interruption in the last five years, business continuity is becoming a concern for many organisations, especially the SMEs. Business continuity incorporates pre-emptive measures such as cyber-defences to minimise risk, proactive tactics such as system backups in case a problem arises and plans for a reactive strategy, which should include disaster recovery (DR), ready in case the worst happens.

But in the wake of disaster, how do businesses continue with everyday operations?

Business continuity

Traditional on-premise backup systems use removable media in the form of tapes or disk drives to store backup data. But this often means designated employees are required to manage and shuffle the backup media every day and preferably, take a copy offsite for safekeeping. The relatively high level of manual intervention can lead to errors being made, resulting in failed or incomplete backups. The removable media is typically a consumable and needs to be replaced at regular intervals, which can be costly, especially for larger capacity backups and media.

Beyond simple backups, conventional disaster recovery is a much more complex and costly proposition and typically requires a duplicate set of all the critical systems installed at a remote location, ready to step in if disaster strikes at the primary location. Many businesses have other concerns when it comes to backups and DR so it’s easy to see why organisations would question spending often serious budget on ‘what if’ technology that may never be needed. But what if disaster does strike? 

Cloud-based DR

Cloud technology has drastically reduced storage costs and has made backing up entire systems much more cost-effective and straightforward. All of the leading cloud providers – Microsoft, Amazon and Google – now offer backup as a core service of their cloud offerings, and clients can generally select whichever backup schedule and retention policy they wish to utilise.

Cloud computing also addresses the DR requirement. Major cloud service providers employ large-scale resilience and redundancy to ensure their systems remain operational. In the unlikely event an entire data centre goes down, client systems could operate from a second data centre. Most providers will also be able to backup on-premise systems and store that data in their cloud-based storage with the same freedom to define schedule and retention. However, the very best systems can also provide a full DR service for on-premise systems by replicating on-premise data in almost real-time into the cloud. Then, if disaster strikes, the systems can automatically allocate computing resource e.g. CPUs, RAM etc. and “spin-up” virtual servers to seamlessly take over until normal service is resumed on-site. Once the disaster has passed, the cloud systems will “fail-back” to the on-premise systems and synchronise all data that was changed during the disaster window. This means that when it comes to defining a DR strategy, businesses now have far more options available, with genuine DR systems now a cost-effective possibility for SMEs.

The SME

SMEs in particular are starting to discover the advantages of utilising cloud-based DR strategies. For businesses that may not have significant budget set aside specifically for IT resource, cloud-based solutions hold the key to successful adoption. Operating on usage-based costings, this type of system is ideal for cloud DR as the secondary or replicated IT infrastructure lays in wait until it’s required and businesses need only pay for it when, or if, they need it. Without the need for physical storage in data centres, smaller businesses are able to deploy their own disaster recovery strategy, making it no longer just for the larger enterprises. 

So, what now?

Although business continuity should be a priority for businesses, in traditionally ‘offline’ industries, organisations often see IT decisions as tactical rather than strategic. Businesses will cease to function at full capacity if a disaster strikes and the necessary business continuity procedures are not in place; and as a direct result will experience a significant increase in down time and expenditure.    

If it isn’t already, business continuity must become a priority for organisations. It’s now easier than ever to migrate to the cloud and take advantage of the inbuilt backup and disaster recovery options available. With the rate of cyber attacks on businesses of all sizes increasing significantly, no company is immune from the threat of hacking, human error or natural disasters and there is no longer an excuse to not have these systems and procedures in place.

• Big data adoption reached 53% in 2017 for all companies interviewed, up from 17% in 2015, with telecom and financial services leading early adopters.
• Reporting, dashboards, advanced visualization end-user “self-service” and data warehousing are the top five technologies and initiatives strategic to business intelligence.
• Data warehouse optimization remains the top use case for big data, followed by customer/social analysis and predictive maintenance.
• Among big data distributions, Cloudera is the most popular, followed by Hortonworks, MAP/R, and Amazon EMR.

These and many other insights are from Dresner Advisory Services’ insightful 2017 Big Data Analytics Market Study (94 pp., PDF, client accessed reqd), which is part of their Wisdom of Crowds® series of research. This third annual report examines end-user trends and intentions surrounding big data analytics, defined as systems that enable end-user access to and analysis of data contained and managed within the Hadoop ecosystem. The 2017 Big Data Analytics Market Study represents a cross-section of data that spans geographies, functions, organization size, and vertical industries. Please see page 10 of the study for additional details regarding the methodology.

“Across the three years of our comprehensive study of big data analytics, we see a significant increase in uptake and usage and a large drop of those with no plans to adopt,” said Howard Dresner, founder and chief research officer at Dresner Advisory Services. “In 2017, IT has emerged as the most typical adopter of big data, although all departments – including finance – are considering future use. This is an indication that big data is becoming less an experimental endeavor and more of a practical pursuit within organizations.”

Key takeaways include the following:

Reporting, dashboards, advanced visualization end-user “self-service” and data warehousing are the top five technologies and initiatives strategic to business intelligence

Big data ranks 20th across 33 key technologies Dresner Advisory Services currently tracks.  Big data analytics is of greater strategic importance than the Internet of Things (IoT), natural language analytics, cognitive business intelligence (BI) and location intelligence.

53% of companies are using big data analytics today, up from 17% in 2015 with telecom and financial services industries fueling the fastest adoption

Telecom and financial services are the most active early adopters, with technology and healthcare being the third and fourth industries seeing big data analytics. Education has the lowest adoption as 2017 comes to a close, with the majority of institutions in that vertical saying they are evaluating big data analytics for the future. North America (55%) narrowly leads EMEA (53%) in their current levels of big data analytics adoption. Asia-Pacific respondents report 44% current adoption and are most likely to say they “may use big data in the future.”

Data warehouse optimization is considered the most important big data analytics use case in 2017, followed by customer/social analysis and predictive maintenance

Data warehouse optimization is considered critical or very important by 70% of all respondents. It’s interesting to note and ironic that the Internet of Things (IoT) is among the lowest priority use cases for big data analytics today.

Big data analytics use cases vary significantly by industry with data warehouse optimization dominating financial services

Customer/social analysis is the leading use case in technology-based companies. Fraud detection use cases also dominate financial services and telecommunications. Using big data for clickstream analytics is most popular in financial services.

Spark, MapReduce, and Yarn are the three most popular software frameworks today

Over 30% of respondents consider Spark critical to their big data analytics strategies. MapReduce and Yarn are “critical” to more than 20 percent of respondents.

The big data access methods most preferred by respondents include Spark SQL, Hive, HDFS and Amazon S3

73% of the respondents consider Spark SQL critical to their analytics strategies. Over 30% of respondents consider Hive and HDFS critical as well. Amazon S3 is critical to one of five respondents for managing big data access. The following graphic shows the distribution of big data access methods.

Machine learning continues to gain more industry support and investment plans with Spark Machine Learning Library (MLib) adoption projected to grow by 60% in the next 12 months

In the next 24 months, MLib will dominate machine learning according to the survey results. MLib is accessible from the Sparklyr R Package and many others, which continues to fuel its growth. The following graphic compares projected two-year adoption rates by machine learning libraries and frameworks.

Leading cloud providers have said they are aware of and working on securing systems after the disclosure of two major chip-level security vulnerabilities earlier this week.

As first reported by The Register, a ‘fundamental’ design flaw in Intel’s processor chips, dubbed Meltdown, was followed by another flaw, called Spectre, found in chips from Intel, AMD and ARM. The latter was confirmed by Google researchers in a blog post published yesterday.

The key to the vulnerability is through a processor technique called ‘speculative execution’. In other words, modern processors can estimate what task needs to be done next, and if it is correct, then is executed in a much quicker time than otherwise. As the Google blog notes, malicious actors ‘could take advantage of speculative execution to read system memory that should have been inaccessible’, such as passwords or encryption keys.

So how does this affect cloud providers? A blogger going under the name of Python Sweetness asserted on January 1 that the vulnerability will affect major cloud providers. “There are hints the attack impacts common virtualisation environments including Amazon EC2 and Google Compute Engine,” the post reads.

In a security bulletin, Amazon Web Services (AWS) said ‘all but a small single-digit percentage of instances across the Amazon EC2 fleet’ were already protected. Microsoft said in a statement that it was “in the process of deploying mitigations to cloud services”, as well as releasing security updates. Google issued a bulletin for its cloud products with Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Dataflow and Cloud Dataproc requiring updates, while a statement from Josh Feinblum, chief security officer at DigitalOcean, recommended server reboots for users and promised urgent maintenance if this was unsuccessful.  

A statement from Intel issued yesterday said the company was committed to product and customer security and was working with AMD, ARM, and others ‘to develop an industry-wide approach to resolve this issue promptly and constructively.’

“Intel has begun providing software and firmware updates to mitigate these exploits,” the statement added. “Contrary to some reports, any performance impacts are workload-dependent, and, for the average computer user, should not be significant and will be mitigated over time.”

AMD also issued an update, stressing the importance that the research was performed in lab conditions and the threat had not been seen in the public domain.

New figures from Synergy Research around the state of the enterprise IT infrastructure market show that hosted and cloud collaboration revenues continue to grow quickly – with Microsoft at the top of the tree.

The overall market however – including data centre servers, switchers and routers, on-premise collaboration, network security and WLAN – has Cisco at its front with HPE behind. Aside from data centre servers and cloud collaboration, where it is second behind Microsoft, Cisco leads in the other segments and has a 26% overall market share, according to Synergy. HPE has 11% market share across the six segments.

Not surprisingly, hosted and cloud collaboration remains the fastest growing segment of enterprise IT infrastructure, with a growth rate of more than 12% year on year. WLAN, switchers and routers and network security also grew above the average rate, with the data centre server market flatlining and on-premise collaboration going backwards.

Other cited vendors include Dell EMC, with second position in data centres servers, Huawei for switches and routers, and Check Point for network security.

“Despite a burgeoning public cloud market, enterprise IT infrastructure spending was still on the rise in 2017 and will be for the next five years,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy founder and chief analyst in a statement. “The focus of that spending is changing, however, with a growing emphasis on hosted solutions, subscription-based business models and emerging technologies.

“Those changes will continue to present challenges for incumbent vendors and opportunities for new market entrants.”

Figures issued by Synergy earlier this week focused on the data centre market, with M&A deals for 2017 outpacing 2015 and 2016 combined.

The appetite for data centre deals in 2017 increased dramatically, with 48 transactions at $20 billion overall, according to Synergy Research.

The total surpasses those of 2015 and 2016 combined, which produced 45 deals – 28 in 2016 and 17 in 2015 – at just over $15bn. What’s more, Synergy adds, 2018 will start with $2.6bn of deals which have been agreed but are yet to close. In this category, for instance, would be Equinix’s planned acquisition of data centre provider Metronode for $1.035bn AUD (£594m), announced in December.

Not surprisingly, Equinix is, alongside Digital Realty, the largest investor in the space. A deal which ran into this year having been announced in December 2016 was the buying of 29 data centres from Verizon for $3.6 billion. Excluding Metronode, between 2015 and 2017 Equinix and Digital Realty have made acquisitions totalling $19 billion between them, with the former focusing on a global strategy and the latter concentrating on the US and Europe.

Digital Realty spent the most on one deal in 2017, its $7.6bn acquisition of DuPont Fabros. In comparison, the largest acquisition in 2015 and 2016 was Equinix buying TelecityGroup for $3.8bn.

John Dinsdale, research director and a chief analyst at Synergy Research, said the shift was being driven by enterprises giving less priority to owning data centre assets – the Verizon case being a good example – and more priority to improving their IT capabilities.

“That shift is driving huge growth in outsourcing, whether it is via cloud services, or use of colocation facilities, or sale and leaseback of data centres,” said Dinsdale, adding: “The dramatic growth of cloud providers is also driving changes in the data centre industry, as data centre operators strive to help them rapidly increase scale and global footprint.

“We expect to see much more data centre M&A over the next five years.”

The hotel and hospitality industry, enabled with advanced technology and more collaboration with associated businesses, will see some important trends in 2018 as hotel brands reinvent themselves to cater to a new type of clientele. Millennial guests will dominate the landscape, and reshape the industry with demands for more automated options and conveniences and the ability to do everything from a smartphone, and hotels – eager to deliver more conveniences to this younger audience – will forge closer alliances with retailers and community destination

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The cloud market is growing at a rate of 30% annually and is expected to reach $130 billion. Analysts predict that service providers are well positioned to be the leading point of distribution for cloud services in light of the scale of their operations and their capacity to offer end-to-end lifecycle management for IaaS, SaaS and PaaS over secure managed networks.

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