The Continued Digital Transformation of IT Around the World

By Andy Syrewicze, Technical Evangelist, Altaro Software

Let's face it, 2020 was an absolute dumpster-fire of a year. COVID-19 ran rampant, you couldn't hardly live a day without hearing about politics, and 10 episodes of the Mandalorian just wasn't enough baby Yoda to go around. Despite the craziness of the world, the tech industry kept striding forward with many trends that we've seen for years, and some others that have been driven by the challenges we faced recently.

While many organizations are riding this wave already, it always helps to gaze into that crystal ball a bit and try to prepare for the coming year ahead, starting with perhaps the most obvious prediction.

1.       Remote Work and the Associated Considerations will Continue to Grow - I think if this year has taught employers anything it's that you can still maintain a highly productive workforce, even when staff aren't in the confines of an office. This of course assumes your business is able to allow remote work and does not require workers to be physically present to run factory machines, see medical patients...etc..etc. In order to maintain that productivity however many organizations were forced to quickly adopt new WFH technologies and cloud resources such as Microsoft 365, Teams, and Windows Virtual Desktop. Expect to see that trend continue, for at least the near term. Until the population at large is widely vaccinated, there is no slowing down this WFH train that we're on.

2.       Security for WFH Operations Will Take Higher Precedence - Every day it seems there is a new breach of some sort, and 2020 has been no exception. WFH-centric organizations have not only been challenged when it comes to enabling WFH, but it has required a new organizational security posture many have not had to worry about before. In the coming months I would expect to see many organization working to implement and leverage cloud security technologies such as Multi-Factor Authentication, Conditional Access, Secure Score, and many other security-related technologies from the M365 stack, at a minimum. As with many things, COVID-necessitated functionality came first, and security was something of an afterthought for many.

3.       WFH Success Will Continue to Drive Further Cloud Adoption and Reduce On-Prem Datacenter Hardware Sales - The success that many organizations have had with remote work over this last year has helped sell many of them on cloud technologies. With this new found comfort regarding cloud technologies and the WFH requirements that have been imposed on many businesses over the last year, many see cloud-native as the path forward for their work forces. As such, expect to see further adoption of services like M365, Azure Active Directory, and Azure IaaS/PaaS for core services as opposed to on-premises technologies and hardware. The on-prem hardware market was already struggling, this will only serve to accelerate the decline.     

4.       Containers & Kubernetes Will Continue to Transform the Datacenter Space - It has been no secret that containers and Kubernetes have been slowly whittling away at our need for more virtual machines. Many see these technologies as the natural evolution of virtualization. With the success of platforms like AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service), adoption of containerized applications is becoming easier than ever and more applications over the coming year will continue to move out of virtual machines and into containers. That said, many organizations do not have this skill set in their toolbox, and as such, I predict there will be a growing need for hired expertise around these technologies for some time to come. Regardless of whether you are a service provider or internal IT, it's time to skill up!

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About the Author

Andy is a 15+ year IT pro specializing in Infrastructure, Cloud, and the Microsoft 365 Suite. By day he works as a Technical Evangelist for Altaro Software, and by night he shares his IT knowledge online or over a cold beer. He holds the Microsoft MVP award in Cloud and Datacenter Management, and Andy is one of few who is also a VMware vExpert.