By Murad Kablan, CEO and Co-Founder, Stateless, Inc.

2020 Outlook on Networking, The Cloud and Interconnectivity

Data center managers strive to maintain a highly functional network infrastructure capable of providing the bandwidth, scalability and functionality for complex enterprise workloads. However, with increasing security concerns, the rise of hyperscale public clouds, complex multi-cloud deployment scenarios and the movement of applications and data to the network edge, the network environment has become necessarily more sophisticated. Over the next 12 months, these issues will compound and drive what we believe will be the most noteworthy networking and interconnectivity trends of 2020.

Encryption everywhere

Security experts are discovering that there's no such thing as a trusted network. While encryption has typically been the job of firewalls, new lightweight microservice-based solutions are emerging to allow the encryption of every network connection.

Multi-cloud automation

Driven partly by demand and partly by ongoing technical innovation, hyperscale clouds will reach a state of interoperability that will unlock the ability of end-users to achieve automation across multiple clouds.

5G displaces last mile access

Businesses have been held hostage; being limited to selecting locations based on the reach of wireline connectivity. This is all about to change with 5G. This wireless technology will provide the ability to stream full 4K quality movies to cell phones, offering speeds that will rival fiber connectivity. 5G networks will allow businesses and wireless operators to connect to each other in places previously unfathomable.

Named Data Networking

Today networking technologies are focused on the transfer of ones and zeros from one point to another. The network has limited awareness of the content that it carries. Humans care about the content not the bits and bytes. Technologies like NDN, Blockchain and the separation of state from processing will enable networks to be treated as queryable information stores.

Colocation providers become next-gen network operators

The world has known two primary types of network operators, legacy wireline and wireless. This model worked well when data needed to be sent from point A to point Z. Now data lives at point B, point C and every point in-between. Those points in-between are data centers. It makes no sense for businesses to connect to a carrier so they can take the data to the carrier's gateway and then take it to the data center. Many data center operators understand this and they are building their networks to bypass the legacy carriers (and the Internet too).

Looking beyond 2020 and toward 2025

DevOps teams in every enterprise

Over the last few years industry leaders have been telling IT that they need to step up and help their companies take advantage of the latest technology. Now a new type of skill set is emerging; DevOps. This new type of engineer is specifically focused on how to leverage not only new IT tech, but also new advances in the Cloud, software and automation. DevOps teams will become the new creators of innovation in the corporate world.

The network is storage

The network stores data today, but the data is only stored while it is in transit and the network is not aware of the contents of the information it is storing. NDN will allow networks to be content aware. Network operators will be able to cache information and when multiple users ask for data the network will be able to fulfill those requests without having to pull the data from the original source. Data will live on the network until it is no longer needed.

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