Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019.  Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Leah Schoeb, Master Technologist/ Technical Marketing Engineer, Rubrik

The Data Management Revolution for 2019

Data is in the center of this current digital transformation.  Like bank currency, data needs to be managed and protected under compliance and governance laws.  Companies are moving from legacy monolithic infrastructures to modern distributed hybrid cloud infrastructures.  This means how data is protected and managed has to transition and evolve. This transition involves moving from traditional storage management to data management. Traditional storage management is about managing storage hardware and the data it contains in a single system or cluster. Data management is about managing data and is agnostic to the underlying infrastructure.  How and where Data in today's infrastructures are stored is evolving with this digital transformation. It is stored in public/private cloud, IOT, edge and mobile devices on new forms of media using new protocols. There is a new broadening variety of data structures, containers, and interfaces that support data-driven use cases, such as, analytics, self-service multi-tenancy, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. There will be new innovations in 2019 in data management to meet the needs of protecting and managing data in these new hybrid cloud environments.  

As of 2018, there is no one data management product that has all of the needed major components in one product. In order to keep up with evolving needs, data management vendors look towards the open source community to help supply new tools and capabilities to expand their products. But due to lack of interoperability between products, this still requires several products to be purchased to fully manage and protect data for modern hybrid cloud and new distributed environments.  This can be a nightmare for administrators for monitoring, reporting, managing, and protecting data.

There are several major components of the new data management for hybrid cloud environments going into 2019. These include data protection, business continuity, archive/preservation, compliance, data governance, capacity optimization, and visibility. Data management companies will expand their capabilities through alliance, acquisition, and native development to offer these major components in one product. This will simplify data management for administrators and provide the ability to manage, protect, and report intelligently under one management umbrella creating a purpose-built data management product for data and its uses.  

• Data Protection/Business Continuity - Ransomware and other malware attacks will continue to rise and evolve to more intelligent attacks in 2019.  The number of natural disasters and other activities that destroy entire data centers will also continue in 2019.  This means more intelligent and efficient ways to prevent business interruptions will evolve with data protection and data management companies. These are all reasons why the importance of a good data protection strategy and disaster recovery plan is an essential part to business continuity.
• Archive/preservation - Long-term cold storage will continue to grow in 2019 with the application demand to use and produce more data than ever before.  The idea of storing long-term archival information will need innovation from the use of cheap magnetic media to a media that is less inclined to lose bits over time.  As solid-state technology becomes less expensive, this may be an alternative in 2019 for storage. This can make preservation more efficient in the long run.
• Compliance/Data Governance - Vulnerabilities and regulations around data will continue to increase in 2019. Organizations must not only comply with the GDPR regulations set out on May 25, 2018, but in 2019 they must be able to demonstrate their compliance or face hefty fines. The ePrivacy Regulation will be implemented in the second half of 2019 and will address advances in electronic communications and its associated data, such as emails, messages, blogs, websites, and IOT devices. There will be some overlap with the ePrivacy Regulation and GDPR but the main difference is that the ePrivacy Regulation is about electronic communications only and the GDPR is about all forms of personal data. In 2019 there will be a need for data management vendors to provide easy innovative ways to help organizations demonstrate and maintain this new compliance and regulation.
• Capacity Optimization - Optimizing resources such as storage capacity is crucial to controlling cost.  The use of new applications and use cases, such as analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are on the rise.  This means the need to optimize capacity will increase to manage cost, otherwise IT budgets will spiral out of control for businesses adopting this digital transformation as part of their business initiatives.
• Visibility - Today there are over 320 million workloads active in datacenters around the world at any given time as of 2018.  By 2020 it is estimated there will be over 450 million workloads globally with at least half actively running in the public cloud.  This increased use of the public cloud in hybrid cloud infrastructure adds to the complexity of data management. Data visibility will be the crucial key to improving and reducing cost both hybrid cloud environments.
  

2019 will be the year to expand the capabilities of data management products for data protection, preservation, optimization, and visibility to efficiently manage data while controlling cost during this digital transformation.

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