Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022. Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
2022 IT Trends and Predictions: Expect More Change, Multi-Cloud
By Brian Knudtson, Director of Cloud Market Intelligence at iland
To me, the best part of being in the IT industry is the variety and change we continuously experience. Once one technology is mastered, there are dozens of new technologies to then focus on. It’s a never-ending cycle of exploration and learning. The last two years have thrown our industry all sorts of new challenges we didn’t expect, but that is the type of environment in which innovation can thrive.
With slashed budgets, a need to avoid indoor spaces, supply chain constraints, and increased demand for agility with our delivery of IT services, cloud adoption has accelerated the last couple of years. Far more than most predictions called for in 2020. Most of this adoption has been across multiple different cloud platforms, leaving customers with a cloud version of the best-of-breed vendor sprawl many of us were used to in our data centers. This approach is neither good nor bad, but does require a different approach to management versus deploying everything to a single cloud platform.
Many companies will spend 2022 wrestling with this new management approach. They will have to start selecting the right platform for each new workload they want to migrate to the cloud, based on multiple different criteria, including the performance, security, and cost implications of each platform. Management and visibility across platforms will also be key so that businesses can see the data they need to make these decisions.
Connectivity is another very real concern that companies will need to address when deploying into a multi-cloud architecture. Should they all connect via VPN or a dedicated connection? How do SD-WAN and SASE fit into these connections? Again, there can be huge performance, security, and cost implications in these decisions that will require a high amount of visibility and expertise to provide the best business outcomes.
Layered on top of all of this is the distributed nature many teams have taken on during the pandemic. That further changes the nature of the connectivity puzzle by dramatically increasing the number of nodes that must independently connect to the other parts of the infrastructure. It also affects how teams communicate and collaborate across the business. Much of this has been built ad-hoc and without the rigor IT teams generally want to apply to new architectural directions. 2022 will be a reckoning for many businesses and IT departments on whether, and if so how, they will enable long-term distributed work models.
The skillsets of individual team members must also be taken into consideration as we move into a more multi-cloud centered approach across the industry. Not everyone in the organization will need to interact with any given cloud provider, so the training of staff needs to be thoughtfully considered. Reorganization may be needed to align teams based on their skillsets, to either consolidate or distribute those skillsets.
Finally, security has moved a lot in the last couple of years. All of the above will drive changes to the security model within an organization, but so too does the epidemic of ransomware and the increasing prevalence of large-scale targeted hacking attempts from distributed hackers-for-hire and nation states. The challenges of security are rapidly requiring highly specialized skillsets, which will force organizations to make staffing choices or to look at partnering with a provider in the rapidly growing security as a service space.
As we move into 2022, organizations of all sizes are going to be faced with many, if not all, of these challenges. Some started before the pandemic. Many were forced to start earlier than they planned. Many others have simply been in survival mode and must make decisions soon. No matter which group you belong in, it is likely that the adoption of a multi-cloud is a good business decision, but the implications can be far reaching within an organization and should not be ignored.
As specialists in adapting and changing, IT departments should be well positioned to deal with these changes, but we should all keep in mind that these changes need to benefit the business in the end.
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About the Author
Brian Knudtson, Director of Cloud Market Intelligence at iland
In his 20-year career, Brian has experienced many different perspectives of the IT industry. He has worked as a customer, value-added reseller, vendor and service provider in roles in web development, system administration, post-sales deployment, pre-sales architecting, public cloud design and technical marketing. He has been a long-time member of the VMware community since 2004. You can find him online occasionally blogging at http://knudt.net/vblog and tweeting at @bknudtson.
