Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2020. Read them in this 12th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Dave Russell, Vice President of
Enterprise Strategy at Veeam
Data Accessibility and Speed Will Be Essential to Businesses
Throughout 2019, technology has
continued to have a transformative impact on businesses and communities. From
the first deployments of 5G to businesses getting to grips with how they use
artificial intelligence (AI), it's been another year of rapid progress.
From an IT perspective, we have seen
two major trends that will continue in 2020. The first is that on-premises and
public cloud will increasingly become equal citizens. Cloud is becoming the new
normal model of deployment, with 85% of
businesses self-identifying as being predominantly hybrid-cloud or multi-cloud
today. Related to this are the issues of cybersecurity and data privacy, which
remain the top cloud concerns of IT decision makers. In 2020, cyber threats
will increase rather than diminish, so businesses must ensure that 100% of
their business-critical data can be recovered.
Here are some of the key technology
trends that businesses will look to take advantage of and prepare for in the year
ahead.
1. Container adoption will become more mainstream.
In 2020, container adoption will lead
to faster software production through more robust DevOps capabilities and Kubernetes
will consolidate its status as the de facto container orchestration platform.
The popularity of container adoption or ‘containerization' is driven by two
things: speed and ease. Containers are abstract data types that isolate an
application from an operating system. With containers, microservices are
packaged with their dependencies and configurations. This makes it faster and
easier to develop, ship and deploy services. The trend towards multi cloud
means businesses need data to be portable across various clouds - especially
the major providers - AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. 451 Research
projects the market size of application container technologies to reach $4.3 billion by 2022 and in
2020 more businesses will view containers as a fundamental part of their IT
strategy.
2. Cloud Data Management will increase data
mobility and portability.
Businesses will look to Cloud Data
Management to guarantee the availability of data across all storage
environments in 2020. Data needs to be fluid in the hybrid and multi cloud
landscape, and Cloud Data Management's capacity to increase data mobility and portability
is the reason it has become an industry in and of itself. The 2019 Veeam Cloud
Data Management report revealed that organizations pledged to spend an average of
$41 million on deploying Cloud Data Management technologies this year. To
meet changing customer expectations, businesses are constantly looking for new
methods of making data more portable within their organization. The vision of
‘your data, when you need it, where you need it' can only be achieved through a
robust CDM strategy, so its importance will only grow over the course of next
year.
3. Backup success and speed gives way to restore
success and speed.
Data availability Service Level
Agreements (SLAs) and expectations will rise in the next 12 months. Whereas the
threshold for downtime, or any discontinuity of service, will continue to
decrease. Consequently, the emphasis of the backup and recovery process has
shifted towards the recovery stage. Backup used to be challenging, labor and
cost-intensive. Faster networks, backup target devices, as well as improved
data capture and automation capabilities have accelerated backup. According to
our 2019 Cloud Data Management report, almost one-third
(29%) of businesses now continuously back up and replicate high-priority
applications. The main concern for businesses now is that 100% of their data is
recoverable and that a full recovery is possible within minutes. As well as
providing peace of mind when it comes to maintaining data availability, a full
complement of backed up data can be used for research, development and testing
purposes. This leveraged data helps the business make the most informed
decisions on digital transformation and business acceleration strategies.
4. Everything is becoming software-defined.
Businesses
will continue to pick and choose the storage technologies and hardware that work
best for their organization, but data centre management will become even more
about software. Manual provisioning of IT infrastructure is fast-becoming a
thing of the past. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) will continue its proliferation
into mainstream consciousness. Allowing business to create a blueprint of what
infrastructure should do, then deploy it across all storage environments and
locations, IaC reduces the time and cost of provisioning infrastructure across
multiple sites. Software-defined approaches such as IaC and Cloud-Native - a
strategy which natively utilizes services and infrastructure from cloud
computing providers - are not all about cost though. Automating replication
procedures and leveraging the public cloud offers precision, agility and
scalability - enabling organizations to deploy applications with speed and
ease. With over three-quarters
(77%) of organizations using software-as-a-service (SaaS), a
software-defined approach to data management is now relevant to the vast
majority of businesses.
5. Organizations will replace, not refresh, when
it comes to backup solutions.
In 2020, the trend towards replacement
of backup technologies over augmentation will gather pace. Businesses will
prioritize simplicity, flexibility and reliability of their business continuity
solutions as the need to accelerate technology deployments becomes even more
critical. In 2019, organizations said they had experienced an average of
five unplanned outages in the last 12 months. Concerns over the
ability of legacy vendors to guarantee data Availability are driving businesses
towards total replacement of backup and recovery solutions rather than
augmentation of additional backup solutions that will be used in conjunction
with the legacy tool(s). The drivers away from patching and updating solutions to
replacing them completely include maintenance costs, lack of virtualization and
cloud capabilities, and shortcomings related to speed of data access and ease
of management. Starting afresh gives businesses peace of mind that they have
the right solution to meet user demands at all times.
6. All applications will become mission-critical.
The
number of applications that businesses classify as mission-critical will rise
during 2020 - paving the way to a landscape in which every app is considered a
high-priority. Previously, organizations have been prepared to distinguish
between mission-critical apps and non-mission-critical apps. As businesses
become completely reliant on their digital infrastructure, the ability to make
this distinction becomes very difficult. On average, the 2019 Veeam Cloud Data
Management report revealed that IT decision makers say their business can
tolerate a maximum of
two hours' downtime of mission-critical apps. But what apps can
any enterprise realistically afford to have unavailable for this amount of
time? Application downtime costs organizations a total of $20.1 million
globally in lost revenue and productivity each year, with lost data from
mission-critical apps costing an average of $102,450 per hour. The truth is
that every app is critical.
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About the Author
Dave
Russell VP Enterprise Strategy
A
28-year veteran in the storage industry, Russell recently joined Veeam as its
new Vice President of Enterprise Strategy, responsible for driving strategic
product and go-to-market programs, spearheading industry engagement and
evangelizing Veeam's vision for the Hyper-Available Enterprise at key events
across the globe and working with the Executive Leadership team in accelerating
the company's growth in the enterprise.
Russell
most recently held the role of Vice President and Distinguished Analyst at
Gartner. His research focus at Gartner was on storage strategies and
technologies, with an emphasis on backup/recovery, snapshot and replication,
software-defined storage (SDS) and storage management. He was the lead author
of the Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup & Recovery Solutions from 2006
to 2017. Prior to joining Gartner, Russell spent 15 years at IBM in storage
product development as a Software Engineer in mainframe backup/recovery and as
a manager of product development, architecture and strategy teams for
distributed systems backup/recovery and storage solutions.