Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022. Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Distributed clouds and digital integration hubs take center stage
By Nikita Ivanov, CTO
at GridGain Systems
It goes without saying
that cloud computing remains the wave of the future for all enterprises. The
question is, what technologies will company leaders rely on to make the most of
the data and analysis taking place in and around those clouds. As data sources
and storage options proliferate, it becomes difficult for IT leaders to choose
supporting technologies that will give them all the computing capabilities they
need, and none that they don't, all without breaking the bank. To help business
leaders cut through the morass of technology trends and give some guidance
based on what I've seen our in-memory computing customers investing in, I lay
out two key trends worth investigating this year.
Distributed clouds
will proliferate
Hybrid computing is
now the rage, but hybrid computing has a flaw when it comes to the ability to
roll out managed services. Companies can leverage managed services from AWS and
other big cloud players for their public cloud content, but until recently,
these services could not jump the gap into on-premises private clouds. Today,
AWS Outpost enables enterprises to deploy appliances in their datacenters and
manage applications deployed in Amazon cloud and private databases as a single
distributed cloud. With a distributed cloud, the enterprise maintains complete
control over its data, while management, ownership and responsibility for the
cloud services stays with a cloud provider. Enterprises can deploy a
distributed cloud within their existing data centers or at edge locations. A
distributed cloud can dramatically reduce complexity, increase productivity and
drive innovation. As a result, in 2022, we will see widespread adoption of this
strategy as enterprises embrace the convenience of fully managed services
across distributed clouds - and more vendors announce solutions for creating
them.
Digital integration
hubs continue to gain momentum
Any company that wants
to innovate needs to create new kinds of services, and one of the best
technologies that has emerged over the last few years to enable that creation
is the digital integration hub (DIH). A DIH enables real-time analytics on data
pulled from multiple source systems containing any type of structured or
unstructured data - streaming, transactional, historical. The adoption of DIHs
picked up steam last year as an enabler of digital transformation, and in 2022,
that momentum will surge again as more companies come to realize that they need
a fast, effective way to easily build new applications and microservices.
Because a DIH can provide data abstraction, pull from stored and real-time
data, and leverage distributed in-memory computing technology for massively
parallel processing - all without the need to rewrite applications or change
databases, it is the perfect catalyst for modernizing applications and services
across hybrid multicloud environments and driving innovation with minimal
disruption.
The global pandemic
accelerated adoption of these computing frameworks as companies doubled down on
their digital transformations in an effort to remain competitive and pivot
their models in response to change. I see no sign of these efforts slowing as
we kick off 2022. I believe the number of industries and companies adopting
these solutions will continue to grow at a dizzying rate as companies continue
to adopt technologies to meet new strategic and competitive demands driven by
digital transformation initiatives.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nikita Ivanov is founder and CTO of GridGain Systems,
started in 2007 and funded by RTP Ventures and Almaz Capital. Nikita provides
the vision and leadership at GridGain to develop the world's top in-memory
computing platform, now used by thousands of organizations around the globe to
power business-critical systems and enable digital transformation initiatives.
Nikita has over 20 years
of experience in software application development, building HPC and middleware
platforms, and contributing to the efforts of other startups and notable
companies including Adaptec, Visa and BEA Systems. Nikita was one of the
pioneers in using Java technology for server side middleware development while
working for one of Europe's largest system integrators in 1996.