APMdigest invited industry experts to predict how Cloud will evolve and impact application performance and business in 2019. Part 3, the final installment, covers monitoring and managing application performance in the Cloud.

Start with 2019 Cloud Predictions - Part 1

Start with 2019 Cloud Predictions - Part 2

Start with 2019 Application Performance Management Predictions

Start with 2019 Network Performance Management Predictions

SHADOW INFRASTRUCTURE EMERGES

"Shadow Infrastructure" will emerge and take center stage: Now that most modern enterprises have embraced public cloud, hybrid-cloud adoption will fast-track in 2019. As reliance on public cloud accelerates, the challenges of managing and securing it will highlight the complexity of and lack of visibility into these critical infrastructures. For example, each AWS account operates essentially as its own mini data center and most IT organizations will require multiple AWS accounts to support their respective businesses. Enterprises will have no choice but to refocus their attention on better understanding and harnessing their complex and uncontrolled cloud environments.
Balaji Parimi
CEO, CloudKnox Security

CLOUD REQUIRES NEW IT OPS STACK

The operational impact of cloud adoption pushes enterprises to reexamine their management stack mix. Now that SaaS has mainstreamed, with most enterprises shifting their application consumption model from internal to the cloud, we can expect to see a follow-on shift in IT operations stacks in the coming year, as more enterprises begin to realize that the existing toolset is not oriented to address externally-hosted applications. The traditional IT operations stack is rich with tools, but as the usage of SaaS applications and cloud-based services has increased, the domain of many of these tools is narrowing, exposing gaps in visibility for SaaS applications and their delivery over the Internet. Network tools that collect data from on-premises will see a reduction in usage and budget allocation, making room for cloud-specific tools and technologies designed to provide visibility into networks and services that enterprises rely on (such as ISPs and SaaS apps) but that they do not own or control. This new operations stack will continue to feature traditional toolsets, but its proportional emphasis will favor cloud-focused technologies.
Angelique Medina
Senior Product Marketing Manager, ThousandEyes

DATA LOCALITY REQUIRES TOOLS WITH CONDOLIDATED VIEW

Data locality will increase diversity. Lots of countries mandate that data needs to reside within geographical boundaries. Enterprises using SaaS or PaaS will end up using country-specific public clouds or even private clouds. As a result, critical data and applications that need to be monitored will be spread across geographies. Monitoring tools and technologies that help consolidate the view of these applications and data will see larger enterprise adoption. This increase in data locality will also require federated identity and access management (IAM) with Zero Trust security considerations. Single sign-on, multifactor authentication, and enterprise mobility management will also become commonplace in the enterprises.
Shailesh Kumar Davey
VP, Engineering, ManageEngine

SHIFT FROM AUTOMATION TO AI IN THE CLOUD

The increasing size and complexity of cloud deployments means that the old habit of not caring about where and how the cloud runs until you have to is dying. Instead, there has been a widespread shift to the automation of monitoring, resource allocation, and troubleshooting within the cloud. Upscaling this automation of processes into true AI which can adapt is the next step, and one which we'll see in 2019 arising out of necessity due to the fluid nature of cloud usage. The rise of multi-cloud, alongside a fear of vendor lock-in, has resulted in cloud strategies not being as static as they once were - meaning non-adaptable automation of processes isn't sustainable in the long run. Concepts such as auto-healing are of undeniable value to any cloud team but, without truly adaptable AI, it will be increasingly difficult for them to succeed and keep up within the shifting complexity of the cloud landscape.
Stephan Fabel
Director of Product Management, Canonical

REPLACING VPN WITH AI

Enterprises Will Use AI to Replace VPNs with Micro-Perimeters to Optimize Hybrid Cloud Application Performance. In 2019, a new class of purpose-built security software will gain prominence due to its ability to eliminate the inherent security weaknesses, cost and management complexity of virtual private networks (VPNs). This new security software will enable organizations to build lightweight dynamic micro-perimeters to secure their application- and workload-centric connections between on-premises and cloud/hosted environments, with virtually no attack surface (an inherent VPN weakness), and without the performance issues of VPNs. And, as we continue on in 2019, enterprises will use AI to replace VPNs with the newly enabled micro-perimeters to optimize hybrid cloud application performance.
Don Boxley
CEO and Co-Founder, DH2i

MONITORING END-USER EXPERIENCE BECOMES CRITICAL

Cloud migration is a huge IT disruptor, and companies will accelerate their migrations during 2019. To be successful, they will need to prove that their apps performance in the cloud meets or exceeds their performance on-premises. Measuring end-user transactions both before and after the migrations will be critical for business success.
Jeff Westenhaver
Director of Sales, Correlsense

PROFESSIONAL SERVICES FOR THE CLOUD

Managed Services and new products to deal with the next frontier problems. More and more companies are moving to the cloud using a Lift-and-Shift concept, where on-premises applications are moved "as-is" from on-premises the cloud, at an increasing rate. Vendors assist with the lift and shift/migration and once done, they hand off the new environment to the team. However, as not all the echo-system (monitoring as an example) moves easily with the applications, a gap is created where everything is now in the cloud and the team do not have visibility to what is happening and don't know what to do moving forward. Essentially, the team is left with less visibility when they need it the most, resulting in significant business risk. Prediction: In 2019, managed professional services and emerging products will address the situation of "the day after" as companies move to the cloud and realize that their existing ecosystem of on-premises solutions couldn't move with them. Many companies will leverage professional service solutions to replace security, monitoring and change/cost management as they become hybrid or cloud centered. Alternatively, it will be easier for companies to start by placing a supporting echo-system that is hybrid ahead of the lift and shift transition and carry it over into the new environment.
Gadi Oren
VP of Products, LogicMonitor

CLOUD PERFORMANCE TESTING

As cloud costs and compatibility increase, you will start to see large companies move more of their fat legacy apps and data to the cloud, and it will bring about a heightened need for performance testing and optimization of end-to-end systems once thought unfit for wholesale cloud migration.
Jason English
Principal Analyst & CMO , Intellyx

DEVOPS NEEDED TO ENSURE PERFORMANCE IN THE CLOUD

Cloud vendors are not interested in interoperability today. And guess what? They won't be interested in it in 2019. The opportunity for developers to ensure application performance in 2019 is in a tiered hybrid multi-cloud storage model where they will need to work very closely with IT operation and or in a DevOps model. An example would be a fast tier including SSD, NVME, and even GPUs moving data over a period of time to spinning disk in the data center and then finally to cloud or multi-cloud. In 2019 there will be a huge focus on: linear scalability, performance and data consistency as well as distributed metadata and multi-tenancy within and across clouds to ensure application performance and portability.
Bill Peterson
VP, Industry Solutions, MapR