Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2021.  Read them in this 13th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

DevOps, AI and Cloud

By Don Foster, Global Vice President of Sales Engineering at Commvault

It has been a busy year for IT professionals as well as for Commvault. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many to accelerate their cloud adoption and other digital transformation initiatives, making it more important than ever for them to intelligently manage, move and protect business critical data. This growing need for intelligent data management has increased demand for Commvault's data protection solutions, as professionals seek innovative ways to simplify the management of their organization's data, whether it resides on-premises, on multiple clouds, or on the laptops that they and other people at their organization are using to work from home. 

As you find yourself wondering what 2021 might hold for you as you are likely working from home this holiday season, here are some of the data management challenges, opportunities, and other market developments that Commvault's Don Foster, Global VP of Sales Engineering, predicts you and other IT professionals might face in 2021. 

Deep Fake Technologies Will Drive Growth of the Data Integrity Testing and Verification Market

• AI has developed to the point where deep fake AI technologies can produce realistic images and videos of people doing things they have never done. These technologies can be used for fun - for example, by making Tom Holland and Robert Downy Jr. the stars of Back to the Future. However, they also post a risk. These technologies make it harder than ever for enterprises to ensure their images, video, and other data streams have not been secretly manipulated by AI. For companies making important decisions based on this data, the risk of making the wrong decision after being deceived by a deep fake or other AI-manipulated data increases by the day. To reduce the risk that they might deceived by AI-manipulated data, expect companies in 2021 to start demanding data integrity and verification solutions that allow them to detect images, video, and other data streams altered by AI. And in response to this demand, expect both established IT leaders and start-ups to introduce new data integrity and verification solutions that allow these companies to avoid being fooled by deep fakes.

Enterprises Rearchitect Their Applications for the Cloud

• COVID-19 forced many organizations to accelerate their cloud adoption plans. During the pandemic they needed the scalability of the cloud to meet exploding business and consumer demand for their organization's digital services. At the same time, they wanted to outsource management of computing, storage, and other infrastructure to cloud services providers, allowing their IT teams to stay out of their offices or data centers and instead focus on managing their business-critical applications. However, these enterprises are now seeing their operational budgets take a hit from the big bills they receive each month from cloud services providers for hosting applications designed for on-premises infrastructure, not the cloud. In years past, we might see a boomerang approach to these high costs, with enterprises quickly shifting their applications and workloads back to on-premises infrastructure after their immediate need for cloud application hosting had passed. Yet, if it is was not clear before, COVID-19 has demonstrated that it is hard to match the flexibility, scalability, and other benefits of the cloud, and that if your organizations do not already have long-term cloud centric strategy in place, it should. Because of this, expect IT organizations to make the rearchitecting of their applications and workloads into cloud native formats one of their top digital transformation priorities in 2021. By optimizing these applications and workloads for the cloud they can realize all the benefits of the cloud, while cutting down their monthly cloud service bills.

DevOps Will Transform from a Sidekick to Superhero in Enterprises' Fight for Digital Dominance

• DevOps - responsible for developing new applications, interfaces, and other digital services -- has been treated by C-level executives as a sidekick (though a valuable one, like Robin) for years. These executives saw DevOps as important in helping their organizations realize their business objectives, even if the digital services built by DevOps were not viewed as central to the organization's success. However, since COVID-19 has put the world's economy's digital transformation into overdrive, C-Suite executives are increasingly realizing that their company's digital services don't just support their core business - they are their core business. As the driving force behind these services, C-level executives now see the success or failure of their organizations hinging on whether their DevOps teams can deliver their customers and other stakeholders the digital services they want when they want them. They no longer expect DevOps to be a sidekick - they expect DevOps to be a superhero. Those organizations whose DevOps teams can step up from being Robin to being Batman and meet this challenge will be poised to succeed over the next decade in our new, post-COVID-19 economy.