Amazon has wrapped an API around IT infrastructure and thus forever changed the way organizations consume technology services, raising the bar on business agility but also creating new challenges in management and policy enforcement. Now, as enterprise CIOs move to tear down these barriers in an effort to meet strategic objectives and evolving user expectations, Wikibon co-founder and chief analyst Dave Vellante sees the industry reaching a point of no return in cloud adoption.

Vellante designated 2014 as the “year of the cloud” during a recent discussion on theCUBE, likening the transition to “the downsizing days when all the applications that should be off the mainframe came off the mainframe.” The “same thing is happening with the cloud,” he continued. “The applications that should be in the cloud will go to the cloud. Certainly, there will be some holdouts – some of the harder to move online transaction processing applications – but the web workloads are clearly going.” He predicts that more processes will reside in the cloud than on-premise by the end of the year.

This new paradigm of computing is about connecting users to applications, according to an infographic Wikibon released on Friday, and public cloud is only one piece of the puzzle. Going forward, emerging technologies such as OpenStack will also play a central role in addressing the need for increased availability, performance, security and scalability in the enterprise, where traditional data center operating models are making way for software-led infrastructure and hyperscale. The rapidly growing variety of workloads has rendered 25-year depreciation cycles obsolete.

Hybrid computing is the future, Wikibon forecasts, with modular “switchboard” data centers extending into the public cloud and pulling resources as needed to drive unprecedented operational efficiencies. The outlook is bright, but there remain challenges, and it’s up to the ecosystem as a whole to drive the vision forward.

Via: Wikibon