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Cloud Computing Expert Roundups Predictions

What’s The Future Of Cloud Data Integration?

Cloud computing has come a long way in recent years. More importantly, consumers are starting to get comfortable with it. Unfortunately, the business world has been considerably slower to completely adopt the new tech. Whether it be too big a focus on sunk costs or simply “old habits die hard”.  Many industries have been slow to adopt a hybrid cloud data integration solution, much less consider moving their operations to the cloud entirely.

The good news for cloud service providers, the success of those companies who’ve made the switch is being noticed by the holdovers. In the years to come, expect an increase in established businesses making the switch as they realize local databases and on-premise systems are obsolete.

To learn more on cloud data integration and what else to expect, we asked a group of industry experts…

What’s The Future Of Cloud Data Integration?

Here’s what they had to say…   

Noah Gray, Development Lead at (ISC)² 


“We currently sit on the precipice of a new way of achieving coherency with business partners, one based upon RESTful API’s and internet-accessible integration endpoints. However, the continuous incorporation of emerging best practice into these integrations threatens to erode the cloud value and security proposition. We’ll see multiple shifts that speak to this increasing operational complexity at scale.

1) Cloud integration pipeline as-a-service. Where partners rely on virtual private networking or IP whitelisting today, a hosted integration pipeline may emerge that converges application delivery controllers, web application firewalls and application performance management tools into a single monitorable, governable, micro-perimeter between each party.

2) The end of fragmented actor identity. Partners’ descriptions of customers are severely limited by excessive PII sharing and a weak understanding of shared identity. End to end actor attribution based upon a shared viewpoint of staff, customer, and service identities will be enabled by widely-federated identity management, policy-traceable sharing profiles, and tokenized threat descriptors.”

Jamie Clifton, VP of Product Management & Solutions for BridgeHead Software


“While cloud data integration is becoming prominent in many industries, it is far from ubiquitous in healthcare, a sector that is traditionally behind the curve when it comes to technology. The reason is that while technology in healthcare continues to evolve, a patient’s biology remains relatively the same. Clinicians are still dealing with the same diseases, so even the most advanced technologies can only help so much to advance quality care.

The most effective uses for cloud data integration in healthcare will be the management of patient data for use by remote clinicians. As our demand for reliable care continues to rise, the integration of cloud data will become vitally important to streamlining healthcare.

Cloud data integration will also be invaluable in furthering value-based care, as the real-time analysis of collected data will allow clinicians to identify trends and ensure that treatment is directed to those who need it – BEFORE they need it. Finally, it’s important to note that this migration to the cloud is not about achieving cost savings. It’s about being able to efficiently introduce new clinical workflows, that are currently not possible with on premise resources.”

Lee Barrett, Executive Director of EHNAC


“As a federally recognized, standards-development organization that accredits companies with cloud-enabled technologies, EHNAC has already seen the advances achieved through cloud data integration and expects further evolution across four major areas:

1) Security and privacy: To ensure its survival, cloud computing must demonstrate that it will protect data better than customers can protect it themselves through identity management, multi-factor authentication, comprehensive threat analysis/response, and strict enforcement of security standards.

2) Cross-vendor resiliency: It’s too high of a risk for a customer’s entire IT infrastructure and data to be the responsibility of a single vendor. Cloud providers will build ways of enabling consumers to have resiliency between vendors.

3) Cost savings: Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) will demonstrate competitive, utility pricing that will settle the question that cloud computing is lower cost than the customer can realize apart from the cloud.

4) Data integration: Realization of the tremendous opportunity to mine the information being held in the cloud. Even in healthcare, de-identified data allows for predictive analysis of population health.”

Steve Garrison, VP of Marketing at ZeroStack 


“The future of Cloud Data Integration is really part of how an organization learns how to ‘trust and verify’ an ecosystem of tools that are designed to work together. Legacy systems might have had APIs, but they were not really meant to bring in third parties. Today, our world is multi-clouds, and applications now need to talk to each other, so you need cloud solutions that were designed for this model from the ground up. This is why we see so many new companies becoming successful and legacy vendors losing share.”

Bill Franks, Chief Analytics Officer of the International Institute for Analytics (IIA)


“In 10 years, the cloud will be fully integrated with internal systems for storing data. Even large enterprises with many internally managed systems will make liberal use of cloud environments in addition to their internal systems.

Today, it is already possible to make cloud and local data appear seamless to users and applications. As internet bandwidth continues to increase, current performance issues with this type of arrangement will be resolved.

The biggest issues to be resolved surround the legal and security implications of placing data in the cloud. This is an area that requires attention. A decade out, where data is physically stored will be irrelevant to most people for most uses. Only administrators behind the scenes will worry about what data goes where. With this status will come even more freedom to perform whatever analytics are needed on whatever data is desired. This will be tremendous!”

Kevin Liebl, VP of Marketing at Zadara Storage


“In the near future, smart software will eliminate the need to be concerned with where data physically resides and how best to integrate it with other applications. It’s already happening. We won’t need separate cloud integration platforms, and it won’t matter whether data resides on-premises, in the cloud, on a hybrid architecture or on multiple clouds.

Through software-defined architectures, which virtualize resources so they can be managed via software, enterprises will be able to access all their data from wherever and whenever they want. The dreaded need to rewrite applications for target deployments will be gone. Assets based on-premises can be as readily accessible in a cloud-deployed mode.

Enterprises will be freed from the many restrictions over their data, and can pick their platform of choice for storage, servers, and any other need based on optimal cost and performance reasons – knowing it will genuinely work seamlessly.”

Tyler Riddell, Director of Marketing For eSUB Construction Software


“In the future more types of industries will benefit from the use of cloud software. For example, in the construction field, communication is the key to success of a project. Mobile and Cloud-based solutions which are accessible from anywhere, allow team members to enter standardized data, site events, labor activities, material costs, workforce information and more into a fully searchable database updated in real-time. The result is increased project organization, delivery and profit resulting in the successful completion of a project. Often, a project failure is due to lack of communication and collaboration among the project team(s).”

Bert Barabas, CTO of MIOsoft


“Cloud data integration will be expected to be far more sophisticated than it is today. Initially, companies will look to cloud data integration to ensure rudimentary connectivity between different cloud services, business tools, and cloud and internal data sources, but they’ll soon start seeking more value. Cloud data integration will have to start offering higher business value by connecting data at the semantic level and using techniques like entity resolution to understand exactly how data is related. Future cloud data integration will even be able to suggest new sources of relevant information, and automatically relate them.”

Matt Kozloski, VP of Professional Services at Kelser Corporation


“We are heading toward a world where the internet of things and cloud data combine to bring rich sensor information to life. Applications will have access to all types of information.

Imagine your self-driving car using cloud data from weather services to intelligently and automatically steer you away from a storm with tornado characteristics. That same car knows you and the driving style you like, so it looks up a comfortable route from Former’s digital cloud. All along the way, the car is securely transmitting telematics so if something goes wrong, it will automatically take you to the nearest service shop.

Of course, it would be taking into account ratings and reviews for the mechanics as well. The rich data integration will not only make life more convenient, but also will provide lifesaving services to people around the world. Inexpensive cloud services could host and provide data integration and analytics for mobile medical applications so that providers have both personal and crowd-sourced data right at their fingertips to make the best decisions possible in emergency situations.”

Chris Apgar, CEO & President of Apgar & Associates, LLC


“In 10 to 15 years, it is likely that cloud computing will have moved beyond what we call server-based computing. We’re already there with services offered by Amazon and Microsoft applications and processes can be run without the need to be concerned about servers that need to be configured and maintained.

We’re looking at a world where unstructured and structured data reside in a virtual world where it’s feasible to create what I would call virtual artificial intelligence where thoughts may be turned into code or a process to interrogate vast amounts of data and perform precise functions such as what’s the best approach for advanced disease management and how to isolate genes that may be altered to combat cancer and chronic diseases.

We’re looking at an environment where computing is at such an advanced state that data manipulation and advanced technological advances will occur at such a rapid pace that is impossible to believe today.

This all sounds like science fiction, but we’re already moving that direction at a rapid pace and it may turn out that my predictions are much more conservative than the reality of cloud computing in a decade. Now personal privacy and information security will be a concern as those vast amounts of data become even more of a tool to direct consumer engagement. We may be facing the potential of losing a fair amount of the privacy we have left.”

About the author

Nick Hastreiter

I write about the future of business. I approach this by interviewing founders, CEO's, and other game changers to share their vision for the future of their industry.

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