Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2021. Read them in this 13th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
2020 was the Year of Forced Change; 2021 is About Getting Strategic
By Kim King, Director of Product Marketing, Snow Software
Before jumping into thoughts on what 2021 may bring, it’s always interesting to take a look back at our thoughts from last year. It’s safe to say 2020 was a year like no other – literally no one could have predicted the year we’ve experienced. The global pandemic changed everything, and the continued uncertainty surrounding it will of course impact how we move forward into 2021.
With the sudden shift to fully remote work, the cloud and digital technologies became critically important to nearly every organization around the globe. What will that look like in 2021? Here are three ideas.
Adoption of (Good-Fit) Hybrid Clouds Will Accelerate
If 2020 taught us nothing else, it’s that cloud technologies are necessary. We will continue to see increased adoption of the cloud technologies, services and applications in 2021 although businesses will follow a more thoughtful, balanced approach than was possible in 2020 and primarily use a hybrid model. We are getting past the public versus private cloud debate, and businesses are accepting the reality that cloud services are rarely an either or decision.
It used to be ‘public cloud’ was associated with cutting-edge innovation and ‘private cloud’ was thought to be the choice of slow, legacy businesses resistant to change. This sentiment is changing, as businesses are beginning to better understand the value they can gain from a hybrid cloud architecture that enables them to deploy agile, modern applications on the platform that best balances their specific cost, performance, security, compliance and governance needs. With this understanding will come an increased reliance on hybrid-enabling technologies such as containers and hybrid integration platforms. We will also see some pull back to private cloud, as some businesses that accelerated public cloud adoption in 2020 realize that public cloud isn’t the ideal location for every workload.
The Inevitable Addition of Hyperscale Cloud Consumption
As more organizations choose hybrid models, that will also drive growth in tethered compute, which is a hyperscale cloud provider solution that runs in your own data center. While the public cloud market has softened in recent years, we will see the beginning of new growth in 2021 as customers see the value of private/public cloud, coupled with the consistency of hyperscale cloud service consumption. The biggest contenders in the space are AWS Outposts, Google Anthos, Microsoft Azure Stack and increasingly, Alibaba.
Digital Transformations Will Resume and, At the Center, Will Be Data
2020 changed the way people work and live across the globe and we will see much of this continue into 2021. Many businesses will use 2021 to recover from the impact Covid-19 had on their transformation initiatives in 2020, either picking up projects they had to put on hold or pushing to optimize and integrate the cloud workloads they quickly adopted in 2020. Other businesses will embrace the changes that were forced on them this year and find ways to more permanently adopt remote working and the technology that enabled them to first make this change.
For the changes made in 2020 to become more strategic, data will be front and center in many of the transformation conversations in 2021. We will see increasing reliance on insights from customer data to make strategic decisions that enable businesses to better serve their customers and partners. This will fuel an increased adoption of AI, edge computing, and ML.
These are just a few of the ways we think the cloud will not only accelerate the recovery from what was 2020 but also turn businesses on their heads and drive significant growth in 2021 and beyond. We’re excited about the strategic opportunities the new year will bring.
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About the Author
Kim King is the Director of Product Marketing for Cloud Management at Snow Software. In this role, Kim is responsible for developing and executing product marketing strategy for Snow’s cloud management platform, Snow Commander. With more than a decade of experience in the healthcare and technology industry, Kim previously led go-to-market strategy for multi-cloud solutions at Rackspace Technology and played an integral role in the creation and execution of their joint go-to-market strategy with AWS. Prior to her time at Rackspace Technology, Kim held various sales and marketing leadership roles at Biotronic NeuroNetwork and NeuroTechs LLC, now Nuvasive. Kim holds a B.S. in Kinesiology and an M.A. in Biomechanics, along with an Executive MBA from the University of Texas at Austin.
