Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2020. Read them in this 12th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Matthew Johns, Global Product and
Solutions Marketing Manager, SUSE
Storage Will Remain a Top Priority with Continued Growth of Data
Organizations around the globe have
become reliant on storage to protect and preserve all kinds of information
their business has collected. Data has become an integral part of the way
businesses function today, and the reliance on storage is only expected to
increase. According to a 2018 study by DOMO, there are 2.5 quintillion bytes of
data created each day. With this exponential growth, there will undoubtedly be
changes seen in the industry.
Below are three predictions to keep
an eye on for storage in 2020 and beyond:
Machine Learning Will Take the
Storage Industry to New Heights
The storage landscape is changing
rapidly, particularly in the open source space, with innovative technologies
such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) machine learning (ML) and deep learning
changing business operations. These technologies also have an impact on how
data is stored. In particular, ML technologies are making storage solutions
more dynamic and predictive by enabling a more intelligent and autonomous
environment. In 2020, we will see more open source teams harvesting basic,
telemetry data to train machine learning capabilities over time. Additionally,
as more data becomes available, we will see storage teams setting up
environments where machine learning is being utilized to manage larger data
sets and drive business outcomes.
Storage Admins Must Expand Their
Skillset
Every transformational change in
technology brings about change in a storage administrators' roles and
responsibilities. In order to meet dynamic enterprise needs, companies must
prioritize upskilling their storage admins in 2020 to prepare them for the
influx of next-gen technology and new compliance/IT challenges. For
storage admins using software-defined technologies, an extra emphasis should be
put on automation and programming skills. Additional skills that should be a
priority include:
- Understanding
and managing hybrid storage configurations with on-prem hyper-converged
systems and cloud storage services in the public cloud
- Backup
and recovery from and to the cloud
- The
ability to monitor storage in the cloud and watch usage to control budgets
- Networking
skills become more and more critical as various storage moves to different
form factors like HCI, public cloud and others (this may not be a new
skill but could be for some admins)
The scale of storage continues to
grow and there continue to be new opportunities for growth in the industry.
Storage administrators must think of ways to maximize their future value by
gaining expertise and developing skills across a variety of technologies.
Disaster Recovery Will Be the
Ultimate Brand Management Tool
2020 holds a lot of promise for
storage professionals, but it also holds an entirely new threat landscape.
Ransomware, data breaches, malware
and outages are just as common as they have ever been. A breach or cyberattack
has the capability of destroying businesses and company reputations, which is
why storage providers have made disaster recovery a major focus in recent
years. At the end of the day, a company's reputation will be determined by how
they either prevented the attack and/or data loss, or how they responded to the
incident. The key ingredients of successful disaster recovery plans will
include a focus on vulnerability detection, DR team development and effective
communication. There will also be an increased focus on multi-cloud strategies
as way to ensure both on-prem and offsite protect.
As we know, the storage market is
vastly expanding. In fact, a Markets and Markets report
expects the data storage industry to be valued at more than $144 billion by the
year 2022. This is the reason why storage should and will continue to be
prioritized by businesses everywhere.
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About the Author
Matthew has over 25 years'
experience in the IT, cloud and hosting industry gained in a variety of roles
spanning project management to product release and product marketing. He's
responsible for product marketing for SUSE Enterprise Storage and SUSE's cloud
solutions.