Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022. Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
The Big 3, Supply Chain Risk, and Microservices
By Gleb Budman, Co-founder and CEO of Backblaze
2021 was another year of growth for cloud computing, particularly within the storage market, which is projected to be valued at $947 billion by 2026. But it’s also been a year where enterprises have had to manage shifting workforce structures, supply chain shortages, and an uptick in ransomware attacks. As we enter 2022, it’s important to keep building on the success that has been achieved by adopting the cloud, while also taking action to avoid potential pitfalls, like outages and ransomware attacks.
I believe that by shifting to a multi-cloud approach, closely monitoring the chip shortage, and further developing API solutions, enterprises will set themselves up for further cloud-based successes in 2022. Here’s why:
Backing Up the Big 3 Gets Bigger
Companies that generate data in the cloud will start thinking of backup more prominently, and as they do this, they’ll increasingly go multi-cloud by taking backups to independent providers rather than relying on any single legacy provider. Just recently, AWS experienced an outage that caused some businesses to come crashing to a halt. This highlights exactly why it’s so critical for businesses to design their technology infrastructure for resilience, with no single point of failure.
The truth is that anything and everything can fail. Smart organizations work from that assumption, and should consider taking a multi-cloud approach in 2022. That approach looks like data replication not just across regions but across providers, as well as portability between providers.
It’s important to note that in order to enable data to be used easily in a multi-cloud environment, it’s critical that it be readily accessible. To achieve this, Backblaze provides free cloud-to-cloud migration from other clouds, makes all data instantly available, and provides free egress to other leading cloud platforms such as Cloudflare, Fastly, and Vultr. This will then set up more organizations to flip to the independent providers as their primary cloud, infrequently accessing services from the Big 3 as their secondary storage.
Supply Chain Risk and Chip Shortages Remain an Ongoing Concern
Across industries, demand is increasing steadily while supply is experiencing massive limitations. Even when materials are available and production happens, the transportation logistics industry can be a bottleneck. This is abundantly clear today due to the pandemic, yet we think it will be a concern ongoing as more organizations see supply as critical for business continuity and growth.
Chip shortages in particular are predicted to last years, despite manufacturers scrambling to ramp up supply to meet demand. Every digital device from cars to cameras will be harder to come by. Companies need to anticipate delays and rethink their “just-in-time” supply chain models, diversify vendors, and get much better at demand forecasting in the coming year.
Microservices Go Macro
Becoming dependent on one vendor or one cloud provider does not put enterprises in a position to succeed if outages or other problems occur. More, better API-connected solutions will enable companies to steer clear of monoliths and vendor lock-in while addressing all of their cloud storage related requirements-including storage, compute, CDN, etc.-like never before.
This will likely result in gains, flexibility, and cost savings, too. To make more use of their data without paying fortunes to do so, expect companies to increasingly demand lower data egress fees from cloud storage providers. Because let’s be real-many of the biggest players are charging egress fees that are nothing short of exorbitant and egregious. We’ve recently seen pressure lead to some slight or superficial reductions from legacy providers; smart companies in 2022 will demand much more in the way of reasonable egress, and opt to go more multi-cloud with independent cloud providers when the diversified providers don’t go far enough.
2022 Trends: How to Prepare
The challenges presented to us in 2021 will no doubt continue to persist in 2022. Heading into the new year, things that should be top of mind for enterprises should be increasing the resilience of the business in case of a potential breach, diversifying and expanding cloud providers to rely on in case of failures, and combating the persistent challenges the supply chain shortage brings. Looking forward, 2022 is the time to embrace these changes to the cloud and continue to innovate as these challenges come our way.
##
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gleb Budman is a co-founder and has served as our chief executive officer since 2007, guiding the business from its inception in a Palo Alto apartment to a company serving customers in more than 175 countries with over an exabyte of data under management. Gleb has served as a member of our Board of Directors since 2009 and as chairperson since January 2021. Prior to Backblaze, Gleb was the senior director of product management at SonicWall and the vice president of products at MailFrontier, which was acquired by SonicWall. Before that, he served in a senior position at Kendara, which was acquired by Excite@Home, and previously founded and successfully exited two other startup companies. Gleb earned a M.B.A. and B.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.
