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the Forrester Wave™: private cloud solutions, Q4 2013

November 25, 2013

Key Private Cloud solution Trends

As this market matures, Forrester sees the solution within the market expanding to better serve the

management focus of the I&O professional, better meet the needs of the developer, and address the

hybrid future that awaits many enterprises.

Forrester identifies the following as the top solution

trends in the private cloud market:

■

Vendors are focused on IaaS+. A major development theme for 2013 is the addition of low-

level platform-as-a-service (PaaS)-like capabilities for application deployment to private clouds.

With these capabilities, cloud administrators can create blueprints describing preconfigured

applications and their dependencies and then expose these to developers, rather than just

provide raw virtual infrastructure. Forrester calls these features IaaS+ because they lack true

PaaS characteristics, but they are nevertheless very useful.

Two things are driving the expansion

of IaaS+: 1) a shift in focus on cloud value from the infrastructure to the application layer,

and 2) the need to provide developers self-service access to immediately usable application

templates. By providing application templates rather than (or in addition to) infrastructure

templates, I&O is more confident that the configurations will be appropriate and the best fit

for any particular workload. For some enterprises, this was the final barrier to achieving a true

private cloud, and this additional control helped them overcome this barrier.

■

DevOps is back on the table. Organizations have long struggled with assisting both developers

and operations professionals.

Each party is incented to prioritize two entirely different goals —

speed/completions versus stability/uptime — which leads to breakdowns and inefficiencies in

what should be a highly collaborative and repeatable process. Vendors have long promoted tools

to solve aspects of the DevOps challenge but often fail to meet the complexity or speed desired by

either party.

Although the popularity of these tools ebbs and flows, private cloud has brought the

focus back to DevOps. Private cloud vendors see an opportunity to help DevOps through their

software by enabling the developer with speed and abstracting the underlying complexity

required by the administrators. Success would require simplification of the end user view, full

automation of processes, life-cycle management, underlying compliance and security controls,

metrics, and a way to collect feedback through the process. Several product development road

maps include some of these features in upcoming releases, which reiterate the focus on

application life-cycle features over delivery of virtual infrastructure.

■

Capabilities expand to include IT service management functions. As the private cloud

market evolves, vendors often look to add required features by wrapping existing products

into a cloud package. More recently, this includes IT service management (ITSM) capabilities.

For enterprises starting out with no existing tools, this packaging simplifies adoption, but for

those already leveraging their own tools, this can be redundant and an unnecessary cost. For

lightweight private cloud deployments, expansive ITSM cloud suites will likely exceed budgets

and limit adoption. For this reason, Forrester sees an emphasis on multitiers of private cloud

suites that meet the demands of both experienced customers and those supporting smaller agile