ManageEngine 2018 Predictions: Virtualization and Cloud

Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2018.  Read them in this 10th annual VMblog.com series exclusive. Contributed by Arun Balachandran, Senior Product Analyst, ManageEngine Virtualization and Cloud  Hybrid computing and containerization to continue their upward trend Hybrid computing may become the most popular form of cloud usage Hybrid cloud adoption has been steadily gaining momentum over the last few years despite facing a few hurdles along the way. In most enterprises, CIOs and IT managers have more flexibility and control over which applications should go to the cloud and which should remain in a data center. To get better visibility, accountability and control over their hybrid cloud environments, enterprises should track application performance end to end - irrespective of where the application (or parts of the application) is running.  Containers continue to gain importance The rise of cloud computing has also given rise to the problem of public cloud vendor lock-in. To counter this problem, some CIOs are looking at multi-vendor strategies and containers for portability. If an enterprise is likely to move essential applications and processing from cloud to cloud or platform to platform, then containers hold the most potential. All major cloud providers now support containers.   IOT and artificial intelligence The growth of IOT computing environments has given rise to massive amounts of data generation which will require multiple storages. Most of the data will be perishable and can be discarded after analysis. The major test for organizations is to visualize and find insights from different types of data (e.g., structured, unstructured, images, contextual, dark data and real-time) and in the context of their applications. The use of artificial intelligence technologies such as deep learning will play a major role in big data analytics engines that help derive insights from massive streams of data. From the IT management point of view, IT admins will need to stay on top of the performance of IOT devices and applications, big data repositories, and dynamic cloud environments to resolve performance and availability issues instantly. ## About the Author Arun Balachandran is a senior product analyst at ManageEngine, the real-time IT management company, and currently works for ManageEngine's application performance management solution. For more information, please visit buzz.manageengine.com/; follow the company blog at blogs.manageengine.com/ and on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/company/manageengine-, Facebook at www.facebook.com/ManageEngine and Twitter @ManageEngine.