Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2020.  Read them in this 12th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

By Yinghua Qin, Sr. Manager of Software Engineering, Foglight R&D Team, Quest Software

The technologies that are going to transform business

It's that time of the year again where everyone shares their outlook on what's in store for the technology industry over the coming year, and as we enter 2020 and beyond, I foresee that the use of container technologies will continue to grow and have a more significant impact on organizations. I also anticipate that we'll see organizations making a more significant shift to the cloud -- which will have quite an effect on traditional data centers -- and greater integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning into data protection and backup strategies. 

What will all of this look like exactly? Here are my top three predictions in detail:

• Container technology will have a significant impact on business transformation

While container technology may be new for the traditional enterprise, the impact it will have on business transformation over the coming years cannot be ignored. Containerization brings increased simplicity, consistency, and portability to production environments. This enables faster IT delivery and improves performance, arming businesses with new agility that empowers them to respond to changing customer needs fast.

Businesses that embrace the opportunity containerization offers will be taking a vital step towards transforming into bustling digital enterprises that can deliver innovative products and top-notch customer experience. Traditional applications will be replaced by containerized cloud-native applications gradually. A new paradigm of microservice-based containerized open architecture is forming and will become the mainstream reference architecture for enterprise applications. The ephemeral life-cycle of a container brings a new challenge for the diagnostic analytics on infrastructure monitoring.  

• Artificial intelligence and machine learning will begin to affect data protection monitoring and backup strategies

We'll start to see AI and machine learning technologies play a role in organizations' data protection monitoring and backup strategies. AI will become integrated into data infrastructure and operations.  Additionally, we'll see infrastructure monitoring data analytics shifting from descriptive and diagnostic analytics to predictive and prescriptive analytics. Examples like backup failure prediction, virtual machine (VM) clustering, and anomaly detection based on the infrastructure and workload telemetries.

We likely won't see a centralized AI system, but over the next few years, AI technologies such as deep neural network, reinforcement learning, nearest neighbor, support vector machines, and principal component analysis will be embedded into the functionalities of VM infrastructure regardless of whether it's for monitoring or backup.

• Make way for Hybrid: The traditional data center will soon disappear

Over the next several years, we can expect to see the conventional data center disappear as cloud services, Internet of Things (IoT), and other innovations limit the advantages that traditional on-premise data centers can offer. Computing workloads will need to be located based on business needs rather than physical locations, and as a result, companies will begin to move to the hybrid cloud to provide a more flexible infrastructure.

Many organizations are already seeing the benefits of the hybrid cloud, and highly sensitive businesses like hospitals and medical organizations have found success with this model since it allows them to maintain control over sensitive data  by keeping it on-premises while moving less sensitive data and workloads to the cloud.

However, lawmakers have grown increasingly concerned that these cloud-computing systems, which many companies (including banks and healthcares) are using to replace traditional data centers, have security problems that are poorly understood. I think we can expect to see a growing trend in cloud migration movements, and a high demand for transparent business service availability and cost efficency to backend infrastructure changes.

It'll be interesting to see how all of this plays out in the new year and in the years to come as organizations strive to make processes more efficient and impactful.

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About the Author

 

Yinghua Qin serves as the Senior Manager of Software Engineering on the Foglight R&D Team in the Data Protection Business Unit of Quest Software. She has over 20 years of experience in the software industry and holds several granted patents on virtualization infrastructure monitoring. Yinghua currently resides in California, where she enjoys playing music in her spare time.