Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2021. Read them in this 13th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
2021: Preparing for the pent-up data and economic explosion
By
Russ Kennedy, CPO, Nasuni
Once the global, once-in-a-century (we hope)
COVID-19 pandemic finally recedes in 2021, I expect to see an enormous boom in
economic growth. Everything has slowed to a grind this year and there's a lot
of pent up demand for things people didn't get to do, both personally and in
business.
Remember, the Roaring Twenties weren't just a
reaction to the end of World War I - it was also a response to the end of
the 1918 influenza pandemic. As such, technologists and IT professionals should
be planning now for the inevitable data growth explosion when the world opens
back up again. The companies and organizations that use this time now to get
themselves ready will be the ones able to benefit most from it.
A related challenge for business and
technology leaders in 2021 will be managing data growth once the economic boom
begins. Primarily, I expect most organizations to respond by accelerating their
transition from on-premises infrastructure to cloud or hybrid-cloud. After all,
deploying, managing and maintaining on-premises physical facilities and
resources is not nearly as efficient or nimble as managing cloud resources,
which provide ubiquitous access and essentially unlimited scale.
Performance, of course, may be an issue for
some, especially for latency-sensitive applications that reside in a cloud
facility far away. This will drive further adoption of hybrid cloud, in which
data is housed in the cloud and cached at the edge close to the end-user to
reduce latency to an acceptable level. Of course, there will always be
applications and infrastructure that must remain on-premises, but I'd not be
surprised to see most organizations approach having 50% of their apps and
infrastructure in cloud or hybrid cloud, and some may surpass 75%.
A new
world of work
Multiple studies, such as this one from PwC, indicate that many
employees will still work from home at least some of the time even once the
pandemic has passed. This bodes well for technologies that enable people and
teams to collaborate remotely.
It will also change hiring, even in IT. After
all, so long as the tools are available - and for the most part, they are - IT
pros can work from anywhere in the world, especially if they're primarily
managing cloud resources. This means that organizations of all sorts will
increasingly be made up of a more distributed and dispersed workforce, not only
because employees may relocate, but also because hiring managers will no longer
be restricted to people who live within commuting distance of the office.
That said, this new world of work is a
double-edged sword, because now companies located halfway across the country
can hire your best people away without having to relocate them. Companies in
Kansas who have great technologists can no longer rest easy knowing that
there's not much competition for their people's skills nearby. A recruiter in
San Francisco can now snap up your people without the city's high cost of
living and a big move acting as a deterrent.
2021 will also be a year of reckoning, where
IT and business leaders spend a great deal of time and energy looking back at
the lessons we learned from a technology disaster that none of us had any
experience confronting: the equipment and applications were all working fine,
but due to public health measures, people were unable to access it.
In the end, the new capabilities and processes
that we adopt going forward as a result of a challenging year will serve us
well. Organizations will adopt a more flexible, efficient, cloud-based
infrastructure with employees who can -- and perhaps already do -- work
effectively from home. When the next big obstacle arises, there will be no
excuse for not being prepared.
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About the Author
Russ Kennedy is chief product officer at
Nasuni, which provides a file services platform built for the cloud. Before
Nasuni, Kennedy directed product strategy at Cleversafe through its $1.3
billion acquisition by IBM. Earlier in his career, Russ served in a
variety of product management and development roles, most notably at StorageTek
(acquired by Sun Microsystems), where he brought several industry-leading
products to market.
An avid cyclist and hiker, Kennedy resides in Boulder, Colorado with his
family. He has a BS degree in Computer Science from Colorado State University
and an MBA degree from the University of Colorado.