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

Contributed by Jason C. McKinney, SVP of Alliances, Channel, CMO, Panzura

Unstructured Data Matters - Data and Cloud Predictions for 2019

Every industry has one fundamental truth: data drives a single source of truth and value. It's a simple concept to understand, but unstructured data growth is exploding from 1PD to 3PD for enterprise customers. Enterprise video, Splunk, machine data and IoT data sets will be the culprits for this explosion of data growth in the enterprise in 2019. One new idea is the need to reduce OpEx and increase operational efficiency by solving data "information rot" that is sprawling in the cloud.

What is your plan to get in front of this? Enterprises are finding that traditional data storage models to manage these are "archaic" and technologies can no longer keep pace with these data sets. We will also see enterprises that will turn to new ideas with machine learning software, APIs, and cloud-based solutions to capture the greatest value from their data and where it should live in 2019.

With that in mind, here are a few changes we can expect to see for cloud and data storage over the next year:

Economics don't work for a legacy refresh and "housing" of your data:

Traditional on-premises refresh storage solutions are often costly, complex and cannot accommodate increasingly explosive data demands. By consolidating data operations and storage in the cloud, companies are able to break down silos to more effectively consolidate, access, collaborate, and compute the entirety of their enterprise and IoT data. Data sprawl which leads to "information rot," and data islands are terrible for productivity. The average 1000-person company will spend $3M dollars in lost productivity across an average of nine data silos that don't communicate with each other.

The data storage market is now at a critical tipping point, largely due to the decline of solid-state drives (SSD) and object storage costs with a dramatic increase in industry cloud adoption and growth of data. On-premises data storage no longer holds the advantages it did a few years ago as the de-facto storage solution, and market factors will help to influence a broad industry shift towards the cloud for its scalability, flexibility and cost benefits. IT centers are looking for ways to protect existing on-premise data centers while moving to the cloud. However, there is no easy way to efficiently manage workloads to maintain operational performance and efficiency.

Multi-cloud file services and multi-cloud data management solutions will go mainstream in every organization from enterprise to non-profit:

Enterprises cannot afford to re-write their application portfolios and migrate to the cloud. Migrating, and supporting legacy application from on-prem to the cloud is among the highest cost. Therefore, file and object storage need to come together to avoid the re-write scenario. 

The multi-cloud file service and multi-cloud data management solutions and models are no longer a marketing buzzword, and the established multi-cloud market will continue to grow rapidly in 2019. Enterprises will need to accelerate the adoption of public cloud and 85 percent of companies surveyed by Gartner will have multi-cloud services along with a VMware environment on-site. This is four or more clouds to manage with growing data sets in AWS, Azure, Google, IBM and OnPrem.

Increasing access to machine learning and analytics capabilities, together with new regulatory requirements, have made it important for companies to keep more data, longer. At the same time, the bulk of that data doesn't need to live at the edge where it can be accessed immediately. Multi-cloud solutions will be an increasingly attractive option as businesses look to lower costs while securely preserving data, maintaining legacy application support, and introducing new IT capabilities for archiving, multi-site consolidation, global sharing and collaboration.

Enterprise search of your data will be the "killer app" in 2019:

While some legacy vendors will attempt to reinvent themselves as part of the broader industry shift of multi-cloud data in 2019, getting your arms around your unstructured data footprint is key. For most companies, they don't realize how large their data footprint is and let that data become the "information rot." While cloud storage offers the promise of economics, scalability, and durability, it does not offer intelligent multi-cloud file services. Having the ability to consolidate, access, index, search, analyze and collaborate on your data will be the difference maker in 2019.  Delivery of the best of multi-cloud with analytics and control in a single source of truth data set will separate the leaders in the data governance space.

The chief data officer's role will evolve with GDPR and compliance initiatives in 2019 as companies look for solutions to manage the explosion of unstructured data and act on their data with search and analytics. Data silos and data sprawl of traditional on-premises storage are no longer able to keep up with demand, and a combination of increasing availability, new capabilities, and lower costs of cloud solutions will push the enterprise further towards cloud and multi-cloud data service offerings in the coming year.

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About the Author

Jason McKinney comes to Panzura from CloudGenera, a Decision Engine Platform for the enterprise helping customers select and define policies for intelligent workload placement populating the Enterprise Hybrid IT BluePrint thru the SasS Platform. Jason co-founded CloudGenera and was the CRO handling SasS strategy, sales execution, and marketing for OEM's, SI's, Distributor's, and VARMSP's. Prior to that, Jason was at Salesforce.com driving the Concurforce offerings for Social Travel and Expenses on the Force.com Platform. Jason has held leadership roles at Openwave, Phoenix Technologies, and VMWare driving the CIO Strategy for IT Transformation and Virtualization with large logos and System Integrators and Outsourcers like HPES, Dell Perot Systems, ACS Xerox, and Accenture. Jason received a Bachelors in Arts and Sciences degree from Kalamazoo College.