Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2021.  Read them in this 13th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Increased Reliance on Private Connections, Expanding Edge and More

By Eric Troyer, John Veizades, and Misha Cetrone of Megaport

Cloud computing and networking were already prominent priorities and challenges for organizations, but 2020 quickly ushered them to the very top of the totem pole. Organizations have been forced to be agile and strategic to keep their increasingly distributed employees well connected with each other as well as with their growing variety of applications, databases and clouds. One thing is becoming profoundly clear: the cloud, while continuing to rapidly evolve and expand, is not only giving organizations powerful new capabilities, but it is also creating complexity for which traditional networking is woefully ill-suited. Therefore, we expect to see a number of significant adjustments in businesses’ networking and cloud strategies in 2021.

Predictions from Eric Troyer, CMO

CIOs Will Take Steps to Reduce Reliance on Public Internet 

For IT teams, 2020 was all about enabling remote work amid an unfolding crisis. Heading into 2021, the focus will shift to optimizing highly distributed remote work to improve productivity. As employees sheltered in place, the internet proved crucial in the nearly instantaneous mass shift to remote work. Yet CIOs are recognizing that the public internet is not a long-term option for connecting to and between mission-critical cloud services: it doesn’t deliver the reliability, performance, and security needed for complex cloud applications and workflows, hindering productivity.  To address this, organizations will take further steps to shift as much company traffic onto direct private connections to their cloud services to improve user experience as much as possible. This will be critical in sectors with more demanding networking requirements, such as financial services, digital media, and healthcare, among others. 

Employee Migration Will Reshape the Edge 

The distribution of how data flows has been upended by the widespread shift to remote work and will force organizations to continually reevaluate and redefine their networking and edge computing strategies. The pandemic has spurred many people to migrate away from the major cities, which means businesses will need to figure out how to support their distributed workforce with their existing infrastructure. As such, we’ll see more of a focus on tier 2 and tier 3 cities like Nashville and Minneapolis, compared to the emphasis on cities like San Francisco and New York pre-pandemic. 

C2C Connectivity Barriers Will Crumble 

Cloud-to-cloud connectivity has been too complex for most IT teams to manage. That’s rapidly changing. Widespread availability of reliable, low-latency cloud-to-cloud connections will give CIOs much more flexibility at a time when uncertainty is the norm and agility is imperative. For example, an enterprise can now store data in low-cost storage on one cloud, such as AWS or Google Cloud, and connect it to their Oracle or other high-performance ERP systems in another cloud, reducing costs while delivering the needed performance and capabilities. 

Network and Cloud Automation Will Alleviate Some Pressure on IT teams 

Remote work environments are straining IT teams that also face budget constraints. Organizations will increasingly focus on automating their cloud workflows to optimize processes, alleviate their overloaded IT teams, and minimize the need for manual adjustments that often lead to errors and downtime (such as turning capacity up or down). Meanwhile, service providers will leverage new automation capabilities such as broad API integrations with SD-WAN technologies to retain customers, grow their ecosystem and increase customer value. 

Predictions from John Veizades, VP of Engineering and Product

Don’t Forget the Machines: IoT Will Transform Networks 

While everyone has been focused on the shift to remote work, IoT has continued its rapid expansion. In 2021, organizations will take a more holistic view of their networking strategies to support IoT and M2M environments to eliminate data silos and make the data more accessible wherever needed. 

IoT will have a growing impact across industries, driven by a wide range of different needs. For example, oil and gas companies are looking to feed field telemetry data, often siloed in data centers, into the cloud, but they will have to do so in a reliable, secure way.

In the transportation / automotive industry, autonomous vehicles are coming. In Las Vegas, Lyft has given over 100,000 paid autonomous rides with backup drivers. And the trucking industry continues to experiment with autonomous transport trucks in areas of West Texas and Arizona. Connected cars and autonomous vehicles will require new and vastly more flexible approaches to networking to accommodate the constant flow of telemetry data in motion. Ultimately, networks that support connected and autonomous vehicles will need to be near ubiquitous and reliable. To get to that point effectively, the auto industry will need to develop their telemetry networks once, but then look to deploy them anywhere or everywhere. 

Retail has well-established telemetry networks for their point-of-sale solutions. But the pandemic has completely upended the industry. Retailers will be shuttering stores, expanding others and evolving their business models as we continue to face down the pandemic and eventually start to emerge from it. Introducing greater agility and flexibility into their network infrastructure will be essential to survival.  

Predictions from Misha Cetrone, VP of Cloud Product

Cloud-to-Cloud Connections Will Spur Multicloud Supernova 

It’s no surprise, the shift to the cloud will continue at full speed, fueled by remote work. A recent Gartner survey, for example, indicates that almost 70% of organizations using cloud services today plan to increase their cloud spending in the wake of the disruption caused by COVID-19. While the hyperscalers will continue to dominate, we’ll also see a growing field of specialized cloud providers focused on the best-of-breed approach that allows organizations to save money and get the best performance. These niche services cover solutions such as database technologies, high performance computing, and VMware offerings. On top of this, vastly easier cloud-to-cloud connectivity – something that has traditionally been very complicated – will open up new opportunities to mix and match clouds, allowing IT organizations to maximize performance while gaining more control over their cloud spend. This will trigger rapid expansion of multicloud environments, particularly among smaller and mid-sized organizations that previously lacked the internal technical resources to make cloud services interoperate effectively. 

The Edge Gets Edgier 

Remote work is forcing big changes across IT – that holds true to networking and cloud strategies as well. With employees working from anywhere, cloud providers next year will put more resources at the edge in tier 2 and tier 3 markets, positioning data and SaaS applications closer to users. This combined with wider NFV deployment, simpler private line provisioning and end-to-end automation will provide further relief to IT teams working to deliver secure, reliable and predictable service to more widely dispersed users. 

Rethinking Data Center Connectivity 

While the pandemic has accelerated the shift to the cloud, a lot of essential enterprise applications still live in data centers and can’t easily be migrated to the cloud. Now more than ever, we are living in a world where remote work at scale has become the norm with organizations requiring access to their corporate network and the ability to enable remote desktop access. In the coming year, IT teams will seek flexible on demand data center connectivity between sites and cloud providers to solve for this shift in remote working. Think of this as agile networking where a company can quickly enable private interconnections to services based on their day to day operations, even during unforseen times such as a pandemic. This greatly solves a company’s ability to adopt virtualized desktops for remote users of both corporate and cloud apps in a secure, scalable, pay as you go model.

Gartner forecasts that spending on cloud services will continue the massive recent surge in 2021, growing another 18.4% to $304.9 billion, up from $257.5 billion in 2020. As organizations strive to fully capitalize on these new investments and best empower employees to maximize productivity, we’ll see them increasingly focused on optimizing their cloud-to-cloud connectivity, expanding their edge, reducing their reliance on public internet, and instead increasing their use of flexible direct, private connections.

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