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

By Phil Brace, Executive Vice President, Appliances and Software-defined Storage, Veritas

Composable Infrastructure, the Edge and More Will Permeate Technology in the New Year

In 2020, the data management and protection industry is shaping up to bring new services into the fold while making new use of services already in play. Composable infrastructure and AI operations will start to take center stage while businesses continue to find new ways to use edge environments and container technology. Check out some of our predictions on the future of these solutions.

Deepening the Focus on Composable Infrastructure

The year 2020 will see more organizations abstracting complexity in IT through composable infrastructure. The concept of static infrastructure has been obliterated by cloud-as-a-service fully extending to on-prem environments. We are seeing more and more companies switching to composable infrastructure and IaaS as the static components of on-prem environments start to erode. By abstracting these environments, it is easier for anyone with an application to deploy it and allows businesses to deploy cloud-like elastic environments on-prem through container powered technology. Container tech abstracts the software environment while composable infrastructure abstracts the hardware by providing static infrastructure as an elastic service.

At the same time, non-volatile memory express (NVME) will disrupt the storage industry as prices continue to drop. It can be coupled with composable infrastructure and served up as needed to deliver a performance that will make a compelling case for keeping critical workloads on-prem rather than shipping everything to the cloud.

It's important to consider that organizations will continue to face the threat of ransomware,but may let their guard down because of the continued abstraction. They must start leveraging their IaaS as a private cloud to protect data. They'll need to remember that abstracted IT does not guarantee protected data.

Containers Get More Popular

Container technology will continue to make businesses more versatile in their ability to deploy and scale applications. It currently allows for rapid and portable deployment of environments that furthers the abstraction started with virtualization and enables additional abstraction of the hardware. They will also evolve to make it easier to rapidly deploy and shift workloads, especially as organizations continue to transition to hyperconverged infrastructure. They will need the simplicity, ease of use, faster infrastructure deployment and the ability to easily scale that container technology provides.

In addition, containers allow admins to embrace the concept of a cloud experience from an on-prem infrastructure. It provides them with the ability to run a server for an application, rather than waiting two weeks to requisition hardware and get access, among additional processes. While the data still needs to be compliant, safe and able to be interrogated as needed, container technology provides a bird's eye view of the data to those who need it. This is particularly important with the continued rise in edge computing where data is being generated everywhere and becoming more siloed as well as the constantly shifting regulatory landscape.

CCPA and other data privacy regulations are on the horizon and will allow shadow IT to make a comeback. Currently, rapid deployment of container-based environments helps increase the speed of business, but makes it difficult for compliance efforts to keep up. A server could be generating data that an enterprise is responsible for but doesn't know about, and businesses must be able to discover, tag and act on all of the data that they touch as these regulations become more stringent.

The year of AI Ops Adoption

Many organizations have been experiencing a shift from the traditional core enterprise data center to a decentralized on-prem and cloud infrastructure. Another major trend is what I've termed "Digital Users". Digital Users include machine agents, containerized applications (as above), process-oriented analytics, IOT devices and API driven infrastructure. These are significant trends that will make AI Ops an imperative in 2020.

Digital Users can number into the thousands and quickly expose the complexities associated with the manual processes required to deploy infrastructure, apps, and data management and protection services.

AI Ops and API automation holds the promise to abstract complexity and provide significant new levels of autonomous processes. Looking ahead to 2020, collecting data from various operations, tools and devices and the application of analytics, AI and machine learning will become widely adopted, simplifying the adoption of Digital Users, enhancing IT operations and information management with capabilities that will include:

• Automatic detection and self-directed, real-time action on events and issue
• Automated workload and data analysis that drives resiliency orchestration
• API enabled provisioning, management, protection and recovery
• Proactive data classification and action Illuminating potential risks and threats
  

Edge becomes the Next Cloud

The edge will be the next important shift in IT infrastructure. Mobility, 5G networks, AI enabled applications, the economic demands of many markets and IoT devices mean businesses will shift from the traditional core data center to decentralized data centers, adding edge elements to their essential core.

Edge won't replace the cloud paradigm, which may very well still be in its early stages. Businesses will build on their cloud initiatives and develop new capabilities to create, process and securely store and protect data at the edge of their enterprise networks.

Businesses today can have dozens of sites built around a siloed core data center model. In many industries including healthcare, hospitality and retail, they can have hundreds, if not thousands of locations where data is created. As with the cloud, the core data center model won't become obsolete, but as increasing amounts of data is created outside traditional data centers, we will see an increase in smaller, distributed data centers and a shift closer to the end user, and the devices themselves at the edge of the network.

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About the Author

 

Phil Brace is Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Appliances and Software-defined Storage (SDS) Business Unit at Veritas.

In this role, he leads Engineering, Product Management, Business Development and Alliances, CTO, Manufacturing, and Supply Chain, and is responsible for defining and delivering product strategy and execution across Veritas’ NetBackup Appliances, InfoScale Software-defined Storage, and InfoStudio Data Intelligence products.

Phil is an accomplished technology leader with more than 25 years of experience in engineering, product, and general management roles. Most recently, he was President of the Cloud Systems and Silicon Group at Seagate Technologies responsible for Seagate’s Storage Systems Business and solid-state drive (SSD) product divisions. Prior to that, Phil was Executive Vice President of Seagate’s Electronic Solutions business where he led strategy, development, and marketing for SSD businesses.