Catalogic's top trend shaping our information world in the year 2021

By Ken Barth, Chief Executive Officer, Catalogic

In 2021, we will see early adoption by IT organizations of Kubernetes-based container management platforms to support the initial deployment and management of cloud-native business applications. Containers are at the heart of cloud-native business transformation initiatives and IT organizations need to catch up with the pace of cloud-native application development in their businesses, including how that impacts their data management practices.

Per a study by Forrester* in March 2020, it is a top priority of IT leadership to use containers for more applications 86%, use more cloud platforms to run them 81%, and become more cloud-native 85% in software development and delivery.

* Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Capital One, March 2020.

This technology is happening in enterprises now in a big way. Kubernetes has emerged into the mainstream as the de facto standard for container orchestration, with most leading commercial vendors providing a public cloud service or a multi-cloud management platform based on Kubernetes. Containers are a natural evolution from virtual machines to a more granular and portable application environment in clouds, designed to solve problems with rapidly developing and deploying cloud-native applications.

There are many benefits container adoption can bring to a business. A top business driver is to speed up the development and delivery of applications in cloud environments. A container management platform brings developers and IT engineering and operations teams together with a unified approach to achieve the benefits of development speed and deployment scale, while also addressing cloud portability and compliance.

Business and IT leaders need to collaborate and select a Kubernetes management platform from one of the leading commercial vendors. IT leaders then need to ensure that the new serverless, cloud applications being developed meet their corporate best practices for security, governance, monitoring, and business continuity. As with any new technology platform, IT leaders will need additional data management tools such as a Kubernetes backup service to provide the same level of application-consistent data protection and disaster recovery for their serverless databases that they provide for their server-based database applications today.

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About the Author

Ken Barth is Catalogic's Chief Executive Officer. Ken has over 20 years of management leadership experience in the technology industry. Ken is a graduate from the University of North Texas and actively supports a number of education focused organizations in the not for profit community.