As we look toward the new year, we expect some of the key trends will involve cloud-native apps, edge use cases, private clouds, ransomware, business continuity, and data sovereignty. All of these will have implications for how organizations manage, store, and protect their data in 2022.
Gary Ogasawara, CTO, Cloudian:
Cloud-native apps will go to the edge. With the help of the CNCF, enterprises have made major progress in adopting cloud-native technologies in public, private, and hybrid cloud environments. In 2022, enterprises will express growing interest in bringing cloud-native apps to the edge, which will benefit from improved portability and agility. 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 machine learning 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.
Jon Toor, CMO, Cloudian:
Organizations will embrace redundancy to mitigate continuing outages. Massive web outages and regional disasters will continue to take both public cloud and private data centers 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-U.S. 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.
Instead of migrating legacy apps to the cloud, organizations will create cloud-like environments on prem. Containers and cloud-native storage technologies have created new paths to building private cloud infrastructure. Now organizations can get the benefits of public cloud at less cost, with greater control, and with the option to extend infrastructure to the edge. Gartner projects that 75% of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed outside centralized data centers or the cloud by 2025, driving new requirements for Data Management and analytics at the edge. The private cloud will give organizations new options for deploying modern applications, allowing them to make workload placement decisions on economic grounds rather than a one-size-fits-all rush to the cloud.