The market is strong for public cloud services, supported by recent Gartner* research projecting the public cloud compute and storage market to grow cumulatively to $128 billion dollars from 2014 to 2018. That’s a CAGR of 35%. In addition, private cloud adoption is forecasted to reach 72% in 2014. And by 2016 private cloud will give way to hybrid cloud, where at least 50% of large enterprises will have a hybrid cloud solution in place. The cloud is big business with seemingly little in the way to stop its forward progress. So it’s not surprising that service providers, system integrators and others are scrambling to get in on the action to capitalize on the hyper growth of cloud.

 Interestingly though, while the numbers show growth in cloud there are other data points that show a different side of cloud. In another study, also by Gartner, the size of the market for cloud security appears to be trailing behind the other cloud services. Cloud security was a minimal $2.1 billion in 2013 and estimated to grow to only $3.1 billion by 2015. Where the CAGR for the cloud security market is solid, it’s still a very small percentage of the overall Cloud. Someone could draw a lot of conclusions from the data, but one thing we know for sure is that while the cloud is growing at a neck-breaking pace it’s not without barriers to entry in services such as security. This is an area that could easily put a damper on Cloud growth. 

In a 2013 report published by analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG)1,the findings relate that the number of migratable workloads (physical, virtual and cloud) will reach north of sixty-nine million by 2018. This suggests a growth rate of 198% year-over-year between 2014 and 2018. However, there are barriers to entry, such as security, that must be addressed before we see the hyper-growth everyone is expecting.

In a separate report published by KPMG2, survey data relates that 48% of enterprise leaders are concerned that they will lose control, while 42% are concerned that there isn’t an optimal method for migrating corporate data and workloads into cloud. In fact 42% related that moving existing infrastructure is too complex. And finally 39% have concerns related to the loss of data and privacy. These data points indicate a common fear amongst leadership: By going to cloud businesses are worried about losing corporate Intellectual Property. It doesn’t take much to hypothesize that the lack of investment in cloud security innovation could be hindering the growth of cloud adoption—making the benefits of cloud in the eyes of an enterprise executive a difficult proposition and a moot point.

The difference in the desired state of cloud versus a lack of enterprise class cloud services that are broadly available from providers can be viewed as a series of gaps that act as barriers to cloud adoption. One significant gap is represented by the lack of a universally available cloud service that automates the migration of workloads to cloud. Commonly referred to as cloud onboarding, it is the process of moving a workload from one cloud provider to another. Most providers are still onboarding customer workloads using manual methods that are extremely expensive and labor-intensive—costing thousands of dollars to move a single workload.

There are a few companies tackling the challenge of having to manually migrate workloads to cloud. These are SaaS-based solutions that automate the core processes of cloud migration. Until recently these SaaS solutions required the workload to be extracted from the source environment and moved into the control plane environment in order to execute the conversion process. The issue is that all workloads would have to traverse the public Internet in order to be converted and deployed into the target cloud. With workloads moving around hybrid cloud models, migrating using a secure methodology is critical.

RiverMeadow, a SaaS based cloud migration solution, breaks down the security barrier and closes the gap—whether the enterprise is migrating workloads to a private or public cloud environment. RiverMeadow’s Secure Direct Migration (SDM) method mitigates security concerns associated with migrating workloads from a source datacenter into public and private clouds.

RiverMeadow Reduces Cost and Time and Minimizes Risk.

The process is unique and unmatched. The way it works is; RiverMeadow deploys a cloud appliance into the target private or public cloud. The cloud appliance collects source workload attributes and passes them to the RiverMeadow control plane. Based on the collected workload attributes, a custom workload broker is designed, built and deployed to the target cloud within minutes. The custom broker then sets-up an equal set of VMs relative to source workloads. Leveraging an existing direct connection between the source and target cloud environments RiverMeadow then collects the workload data into the target VMs. Once the data is collected the target VMs are booted and effectively deployed in the target cloud. By moving data within the trusted network connection, the need to leverage the public Internet is completely avoided. Security is at the highest level and the speed at which the workload migrates is as fast as possible. Also mitigated by RiverMeadow’s SDM are issues associated with data sovereignty which in and of itself represents yet another cloud gap.

 

Additional Key Benefits: 

  • No need to open firewall ports. This removes risk and the need to open tickets with network administrators to edit WAN settings to access source servers.
  • Self-service ability and support of downstream customers. RiverMeadow provides white label partners the capability to deliver RiverMeadow SaaS as their own migration solution. White label partners are set up as top-level organizations and can provision sub organizations and administrators within customer accounts.
  • Higher Global quality of service. While not knowing the details of the payload, the control plane has ample information to identify bottlenecks, identification of trouble spots in the migration process and to provide a more seamless and secure migration of workloads to and from cloud.

One of the most exciting elements of SDM is closing the cloud gap for moving workloads from a source datacenter into private or trusted private clouds. This will help accelerate the private cloud market by offering a fast, highly secure and automated method by which organizations can adopt cloud services.

 

* Gartner Research, 2014
1Enterprise Strategy Group, 2013
2KPMG International, Breaking through the cloud adoption barriers, 2012