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    Top Five Cloud Trends Expected in 2015

    2014 may have been the year of the public cloud wars, but 2015 will see the rise of the cloud platforms. Allan Leinwand, vice president and CTO of Cloud Platform and Infrastructure at ServiceNow, believes 2015 will be the year of the cloud platforms. From cloud verticalization to business intelligence 2.0, the new year will bring dramatic changes to the cloud landscape.

    The impact of the platform will affect companies from the day-to-day tasks of IT teams to the business structure of an entire organization. The role of IT teams and CIOs will be changed and challenged like never before, and cloud providers will see a shift in their own sector with a larger push for competition, innovation and functionality.

    Here are the five cloud trends we predict will unfold in 2015.

    Top Five Cloud Trends Expected in 2015 - slide 1

    2015: The Year of the Cloud Platform

    Click through for five predictions on how cloud services will change in 2015, as identified by ServiceNow.

    Top Five Cloud Trends Expected in 2015 - slide 2

    Cloud Integration

    Gravitational forces will pull cloud universes together. As clouds coalesce around sales, HR, financials, and enterprise services, we’re seeing how these universes are naturally attracting one another. End users are demanding the expansive functionality that cloud integration provides — in shared services and a broader view of their operations and customers. Cloud vendors will continue to build the requisite connections to draw themselves closer because in the cloud world there are fewer technology obstacles than in the data center era. Specifically, well-defined REST APIs and common programming languages, such as Java, Javascript or Perl provide each universe with a widening and more accessible surface area to connect.

    Top Five Cloud Trends Expected in 2015 - slide 3

    Compliance and Regulations

    A meteoric rise for cloud verticalization. As cloud platforms continue to mature, and more organizations are drawn to the financial and innovative benefits, cloud is spurring interest from even those industries that have been hesitant. Think of those most beset with regulation, compliance and privacy: federal, life sciences, financial and health care. Lots of cloud providers are going to take the necessary steps to receive appropriate industry certifications, creating more platforms designed to align to Sarbanes–Oxley, FDA, HIPAA, FedRamp and others.

    Top Five Cloud Trends Expected in 2015 - slide 4

    Focus on Services

    The CIO will buy services, not compute power. IT teams used to be the administrator of data center infrastructure, but as the hardware behind the cloud (VMs, KVM, Docker, etc.) continues to become more scalable, connected and increasingly delivered as a service, IT teams will move away from a hardware-centric world of storage space or CPUs.

    In 2015, we’ll see enterprise IT teams thinking of and buying services to deploy apps or solve business problems, like adding request management, onboarding employees and purchasing. This has several implications: One is the role of the CIOs is moving away from being associated with broken smartphones, PCs and other hardware. Instead CIOs can focus on advising on how to use IT to deliver the requisite business services. With that, CIOs are re-claiming their seat at the table with other business leaders.

    Top Five Cloud Trends Expected in 2015 - slide 5

    Data as a Service

    Data as a service or business intelligence 2.0 will emerge. As more companies build cloud-based systems of record that capture their corporate operational data, the data residing there is increasingly ripe for business intelligence. There is no longer a need for an enterprise project to find the relevant data and coalesce it into a warehouse – the data already exists in the single system of record. More enterprises will tap this data as a repository rich for operational insight. How are users accessing the company’s business services? What services are the most used?

    Top Five Cloud Trends Expected in 2015 - slide 6

    Agile Development

    The cloud platform will bring an “agile development” process to business teams. Just as agile development has changed the way software is coded, we’re seeing that a cloud platform is expediting the way business teams can convert ideas into applications. By having a common platform to develop on, organizations can let their teams rapidly create and test their ideas — in days or weeks instead of months. 2015 will bring a startup mentality of “fail quickly” to the enterprise. Think of the cloud platform as enabling the “Series A” investor within the enterprise. The cloud platform is unleashing a new era of B2B innovation.

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