Digital Lifescapes

Enterprise AI adoption keeps running into the same wall: the moment sensitive data, model weights, or agent memory leave a tightly controlled environment, security teams lose visibility into what happens to them while the workload is actually running. Confidential computing exists to close that gap, and new research from ABI Research shows the technology has matured enough, across CPUs, GPUs, containers, and now agentic AI, to become a foundational requirement for enterprises building sovereign AI infrastructure: computing environments they control end to end rather than simply rent. Protection is Moving From CPUs to GPUs ABI Research finds that CPU-based confidential computing is closest to mass-market adoption, the product of years spent hardening chip-level isolation for general workloads. GPU-based confidential computing is now generating the strongest momentum, and for good reason. It addresses one of the largest unresolved gaps in AI security: protecting data and models while inf...

Server virtualization was one of the key steps toward further IT infrastructure abstraction. Every enterprise CIO and CTO knows that managing a server farm is problematic. That's why the quest for container and serverless platforms is driving more organizations to reassess their data center. Cloud container management revenue will grow from a small base of $465.8 million in 2020, to reach $944 million in 2024, according to the latest worldwide market study by Gartner. Among the various sub-segments, public cloud container orchestration and serverless container offerings will experience the most significant growth. Here are the study findings. Container Management Market Development Container management provides software and related services that support the ongoing operation of containers, at scale, in production environments. But production applications are uncommon. "There has been considerable hype and a high level of interest in container technology, but a lower ...

The global market for server virtualization technologies has experienced relatively low growth as more CIOs and CTOs consider alternative approaches to support their developer's need for agile IT infrastructure deployment. While some early adopters are experimenting with 'serverless' solutions, the mainstream market is utilizing software applications container solutions. According to the latest worldwide study by 451 Research, the emerging applications container market will continue to expand and be worth more than $2.1 billion in 2019 and more than $4.3 billion by 2022 – that's a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 30 percent. Application Container Market Development When 451 Research first published a forecast on the container market two years ago, there were 125 companies identified in their market analysis. Included in the most recent forecast is an examination of 184 vendors, which represents about a 50 percent increase from the number of vendors in late 20...

Private cloud services are gaining new momentum, partly due to the demand for hybrid IT solutions on-premises. 451 Research predicts that IT vendors with OpenStack private cloud revenue will exceed revenue from service providers with OpenStack-based public cloud implementations in 2018. From a regional perspective, deployments in China and the Asia-Pacific region are now growing faster than in the rest of the world. While not the primary driver, a contributing factor is the Chinese government advocating for OpenStack deployments. Private Cloud Market Development According to the latest worldwide market study by 451 Research, OpenStack revenue will exceed $6 billion by 2021, as it experiences a growth rate of 30 percent CAGR. Moreover, OpenStack is benefiting from the increase in hybrid cloud environments with 61 percent of the enterprises surveyed utilizing a hybrid IT approach. Certain industry verticals and regions that are less enthusiastic about exclusively using hyperscale...

The public cloud computing sector is in a constant state of evolution, as vendors design new IT infrastructure architectures and service providers deploy them in their own unique hyperscale data center facilities. According to the latest analysis of cloud pricing by 451 Research, for the majority of new applications, a serverless solution offers a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than both virtual machines (VMs) or containers. Severless Cloud Market Development When analyzing serverless offerings from the leading public cloud service providers, 451 Research determined that IBM generally offers the least expensive service, with Microsoft leading for certain other configurations. According to the 451 Research assessment, the TCO of serverless tends to be lower than VMs, even when the VM is hosting containers, because there is no need for developers to provision, configure and manage the infrastructure. As an example, when a serverless function is active for just three quarte...

Data center server virtualization and cloud computing requirements are evolving. More CIOs and IT managers will be deploying Linux container based solutions in 2017, as the market matures and the vendors gain new momentum with their go-to-market strategies. The market will grow from $762 million in 2016 to $2.7 billion by 2020, according to the latest worldwide market study by 451 Research. Despite making up a relatively small portion of the overall Cloud-Enabling Technologies (CET) market, application containers will  experience a CAGR of 40 percent through 2020. The entire CET market  -- which includes virtualization, containers, Private PaaS, and other automation and management software -- is estimated to be worth approximately $23.1 billion in 2017. It is expected to grow at a 15 percent CAGR to $39.6 billion at year-end 2020. Application Container Market Development The application container market can be compared to the OpenStack market. But based on the numbe...

IT infrastructure vendors are hopeful that, one day, their investment in the support of OpenStack is proven worthwhile. According to the latest worldwide market study by 451 Research, revenue from OpenStack business models are forecast to exceed $5 billion by 2020 and grow at a 35 percent CAGR. So far, OpenStack revenue has come from cloud service providers offering multi-tenant IaaS, but the latest research indicates that private cloud revenue will exceed public cloud by 2019. Meanwhile, even though it's true that OpenStack has experienced new growth, the vendor revenue contribution is relatively small. That being said, based on their latest analysis, 451 Research believes that OpenStack profitability will likely be achieved in the private cloud space, and in providing the hybrid orchestration for public cloud integration with on-premises or hosted OpenStack environments. OpenStack Use Case Development "This year OpenStack has become a top priority and credible cloud ...

Many CIOs know they must respond to the growing demand for public cloud services within their organizations. Building a private cloud with on-premises infrastructure is a path to progress, and OpenStack is the software platform. The eighth User Survey conducted by the OpenStack Foundation demonstrates the maturity and broad adoption of the open source cloud platform, pointing to significant increases in the percentage of full production deployments. The results of the latest survey findings were released by the foundation leadership, along with a new survey dashboard , now in beta, and six global filter categories enabling anyone to perform their own analysis on the data. OpenStack Market Development Trends The market study is intended to enable a better understanding of user attitudes, organization profiles, use cases, and technology choices surrounding OpenStack deployments. Data is shared with the OpenStack community to help make design decisions and plan for the future dev...

Widespread use of the Internet of Things (IoT) will drive more cloud computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) adoption. Gartner has forecast that 50 percent of all new applications developed on PaaS will be IoT related by 2020 -- thereby disrupting traditional IT architecture practices. Gartner analysts believe that IoT adoption will drive additional use of PaaS to implement IoT-centric business applications built around event-driven architecture and IoT data -- instead of business applications built around traditional master data. Most new solutions will be implemented on a multi-functional PaaS that is a hybrid of application platform as a service (aPaaS), integration platform as a service (iPaaS), IoT device management, orchestration and business process management services as a platform (bpmPaaS), database PaaS (dbPaaS) and analytics services. Cloud PaaS Market Development Predictions Through 2018, according to the Gartner assessment, more than 70 percent of IT organizations ...

This is the season for predicting trends, and 451 Research recently shared their list of key issues that will dominate the IT industry over the coming year. The following are some of these trends. There is an explosion of activity around software containerization, leading 451 analysts to anticipate disruption in IT departments during 2015, as they start to use Docker. Savvy vendors are already in sync with this phenomena. While containerization technology has existed for years, in particular as a software component of Linux distributions, Docker is a more lightweight form that is widely viewed as a next-generation virtualization technology. 451 analysts believe Docker will be adopted by large enterprises to work alongside, as well as replace, traditional virtual machines (VMs) because of its management and efficiency advantages. Docker has not yet achieved parity with traditional VMs in some critical areas, including orchestration and security, and a large number of vendors are...