Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022.  Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Cloud-Native Apps at the Edge, Ransomware, Data Sovereignty, On-Prem Clouds and More

By Jon Toor, CMO, Cloudian

2021 saw continued disruption to virtually every industry, forcing organizations to reconsider their digital strategies and IT infrastructure capabilities. In 2022, here are some key trends organizations should keep top of mind when it comes to managing and protecting their data and supporting modern applications:

• Instead of migrating legacy apps to the cloud, organizations will address data sovereignty and performance concerns with hybrid cloud environments: Data such as healthcare records and financial information are subject to regulatory requirements. Now, cloud-native technologies such as S3-compatible object storage provide a path to building private cloud infrastructure on-prem, delivering the benefits of public cloud while retaining full control of where sensitive data is located. 

• Cloud-native apps will go to the edge: With the help of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), enterprises have made major progress in adopting cloud-native technologies in public, private and hybrid cloud environments. In 2022, enterprises will capitalize on the improved portability and agility to bring cloud-native apps to the edge. However, for open source CNCF projects to work, they require broad standardization of both software and hardware. To support the transition of cloud-native apps to the edge, industry leaders in edge software (such as Red Hat and SUSE/Rancher Labs) and edge hardware (such as Intel and Nvidia) will ramp up efforts to achieve greater standardization.

• Object storage will accelerate HPC innovation: As HPC deployments have become highly distributed and begun to exceed exabyte scale, it’s become clear that the storage component of HPC infrastructure needs greater focus. To continue making advances in supercomputing, organizations will require highly scalable, software-defined storage that can accommodate massive data sets while easily leveraging any hardware innovations on the computing side. Parallel file storage alone cannot provide this scalability and flexibility. As a result, more organizations will use object storage as the primary storage for supercomputing deployments.

• New analytics and streaming APIs will drive next generation edge use cases: Organizations are eager to explore next generation edge use cases. These use cases require the ability to rapidly process massive volumes of streaming data to enable real-time decision making. However, current analytics and streaming APIs used for on-prem and public cloud apps are not robust enough to support such advanced AI and ML at the edge. As a result, new analytics and streaming data APIs will emerge in 2022 that will allow immediate processing of data locally at the edge, enabling AI and ML models to make those critical immediate decisions. In addition, to make these APIs easy for organizations to employ at the edge, new streaming feature stores will proliferate next year.

• Organizations will embrace redundancy to mitigate continuing outages: Massive web outages and regional disasters will continue to take both public cloud and private datacenters offline in 2022. To mitigate this threat, organizations will increasingly seek redundancy for mission critical apps by deploying in multiple public clouds and leveraging private clouds. The tools to run modern apps – such as Kubernetes and other container-based technologies – interchangeably in the cloud or on-prem are maturing rapidly, providing new options for optimizing workload placement to ensure availability.

• Security experts will continue to miss the mark with ransomware protection: Security experts continue to tout increased perimeter defense as the catch all for ransomware protection. However, in a recent report, 49% of businesses that experienced an attack had perimeter defenses in place and ransomware still managed to get in. In addition, 65% of the organizations that were penetrated through phishing emails had conducted anti-phishing training for employees. The threat of ransomware will only continue to rise, making it a matter of “if,” not “when,” an attack will occur. Given these realities, more organizations will recognize the need to protect data at the storage layer with an immutable backup copy, ultimately ensuring they can recover quickly from an attack without having to pay ransom.

• Data sovereignty concerns will create new opportunities for Managed Service Providers (MSPs): Continuing privacy concerns in EMEA since the Schrems II decision invalidated the EU-US privacy shield are driving organizations to look for new options to protect data. MSPs in the EU will increasingly fill this need with locally based services that are entirely contained within geographic boundaries. Now-mature cloud infrastructure – compute, storage, and management – will facilitate this growth, creating a wealth of new options for customers.

Conclusion

In 2022, organizations that take these trends into account will be well-positioned to plan and execute digital strategies that drive business and mission success.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jon Toor leads Cloudian’s inbound and outbound marketing teams. Prior to Cloudian, Toor served as vice president of digital marketing and demand generation at Brocade. He also served as the vice president of marketing at Xsigo Systems where he led the outbound marketing team, a group he led from company launch until the company acquisition by Oracle. Prior to Xsigo, he served at ONStor as vice president of marketing. Toor holds an MBA, Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering, and a Bachelor of Arts in economics all from Stanford University.