Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023.  Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

2023 Tech Predictions: Cloud, Virtualization and Sustainability

By Dan Kogan, VP, Product Management and Product Marketing at Pure Storage

Technological advancements continue to disrupt industries across the board, showcasing new ways of working and performing tasks. With innovation at the forefront this year, we saw tech teams continue to drive their businesses forward. In 2023, we can expect to see even more advancement and growth. Read on to discover what this coming year will bring and how technology will set new expectations. 

The next phase of the cloud era will leverage best-of-breed technologies to drive a competitive, differentiated cloud strategy

Initial enthusiasm for the public cloud has given way to a more cautious, strategic approach. Those who are just beginning their transition hope to avoid the mishaps of first movers, while organizations that are now proficient in the cloud are looking for ways to "de-risk" such as driving cost efficiencies, improving their infrastructure and ultimately making better use of the cloud. The next phase of the cloud era will hinge on creating a purpose-built public cloud presence by working with third-party, best of breed ecosystem vendors, supported by innovative technology differentiators, to serve and enhance the business while gaining an edge over the competition. In fact, we're already seeing hyperscalers like AWS and Azure open up their offerings, enabling users to differentiate with vendors that can bring critical value to a public cloud environment to best suit their needs.

Dual application architecture will rise to the top 

Both virtual machines and containers use virtualization to create isolated environments for running applications. The key difference lies in the granularity of virtualization they provide - VMs virtualize at the OS/machine level while containers virtualize at the software level. While both are complementary and aim to improve IT efficiency, today's modern organizations are often challenged by the question of, "What should be a VM / what should be a container?" The traditional decision of when something should be virtualized compared to bare metal was much easier. Containerization, however, is a different question altogether. In 2023, we'll see organizations move from proof of concept to adoption, and truly understanding how to manage VMs and containers together under a dual application architecture.

Operational efficiency will drive sustainability efforts

Building a sustainable model for the future requires technologies that are engineered to require significantly lower power, lower cooling, and far less waste, with the potential to make a significant and immediate impact on reducing global carbon emissions. However, often overlooked is the impact that operational efficiency can have on sustainability. Introducing operational efficiency by enabling a public cloud-like, self-service infrastructure on premises, can introduce meaningful physical efficiencies of organizations' equipment. In 2023, organizations will look to enable end users to consume IT resources via self-service requests - adding resources on the backend as needed over pre-provisioning and configuring up-front - to drive better equipment efficiencies and ultimately support sustainability efforts.

Customization and back-end access will be key

While there has been a shift towards fully managed services over the last few years, the reality of actually providing fully managed services may not be realistic for all businesses due to the technical and business limitations it can provide. Today, organizations are looking for more flexibility and choice, and are focused on finding the best ways to deploy technologies in their cloud environments. As a result, it will become more important for cloud vendors to provide more access to back-end capabilities (such as running back-end scripts, creating larger storage volumes, adding more performance capabilities, etc.) while still providing a service-like experience for their cloud solutions.

Looking ahead

As tech leaders and businesses prepare for what's to come, it will be imperative to stay one step ahead and prioritize investments in technology.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dan Kogan is the Vice President of Product Management and Product Marketing within Pure Storage’s FlashArray Business Unit. In his role, Dan and his team are focused on Pure’s strategy for growing FlashArray into net new customers and markets as well FlashArray’s cloud and as-a-service products, including Cloud Block Store and Pure Fusion.

Prior to Pure, Dan led Global Product & Solutions Marketing at Veeam, a leader in the Backup & Data Protection market. Dan was also CMO at Azuqua, an early innovator in SaaS-based application integration platform, where he led them from their Series B investment through a period of unprecedented growth that ultimately resulted in their successful sale to Okta. Dan was also Senior Director of Product Marketing at Tableau Software and held a variety of product marketing and management leadership roles across the US and Asia in his nine year career at Microsoft preceding Tableau.