… Druva …

Jaspreet Singh, CEO, Druva, Inc., gave his 2016 Storage Predictions to StorageNewsletter.com. Before funding Druva in 2008, he was senior software engineer at Veritas.

Trend #1 – Data will be mixed in new ways
Companies are changing their approach to IT and running data centres – the growing maturity of public cloud services is at the core of this transformation. IT is responding to the need for greater business agility and this is fuelled by new options around software, storage and mobility. The impact from this is the convergence of data across business siloes, which is enabled by the cloud. In practice, this means that there are more opportunities for collaboration around that business data, but also more hurdles to managing that information and storing it in compliant ways.
 
Trend #2 – Use of cloud DR will continue to grow
Companies are now shifting non-critical workloads to the public cloud first, including secondary storage and backup for DR. These workloads aren’t as critical and timely as those responsible for production applications, which may require very short Recovery Time and Recovery Point Objectives. However, cloud DR can help all workloads meet better RTO and RPO planning, whether that data is held centrally or is found on individual devices like laptops and mobile phones.
 
In 2016, we will see more cross-cloud workloads and cloud scaling, including distributed workloads in multiple clouds within multiple regions. Customers will expect the same QoS with these multiple clouds; independent software providers will act as cloud brokers, enabling cloud portability.
 
Trend #3 – DR will continue to evolve to keep up with business demands
IT strategies are changing as software and cloud services get deployed to meet business goals, In this environment, it’s not just about storing data but using that data for multiple workloads and environments. Therefore, we will see convergence fuel the modernisation of backup in 2016. This will involve streamlining how data is replicated and protected, and these new cloud-oriented architectures will encompass services and service-oriented architecture implementations.
 
Whereas people once bought services and storage separately, there will be an expectation of convergence where a single application can performs multiple functions. cloud workloads and functions such as DR and testing instances will converge. Alongside this, the management side will get joined up as well – the “single pane of glass” approach will allow IT to view data from multiple sources in a single display.
 
Data centre architectures are getting flattened and compute, networking and storage are becoming abstracted from the physical side of the infrastructure like CPUs, disks and SSDs. This therefore requires that a single point of management is added. In terms of compliance, we will see machine learning be applied so backup services can be mined to solve compliance issues more effectively.
 
Trend #4 – An explosion of personal storage is happening now
Gartner recently predicted that people would continue to have multiple personal devices; by 2018, employees will have three to four personal devices that can be used alongside enterprise-provided IT devices. As people use these additional phones, tables, PCs and devices it will spur the commoditisation of enterprise storage, leading to price reductions.
 
Basically, the cloud is consumerising storage. In the future, storage will be like an iPhone and act like a consumed application with SLAs. Comapnies will pay for a service to work as an application, just like you get camera functionality with the iPhone to use with photo or video-related applications. In this ‘mobile-firs'” world, devices will be where you merge various services and SLAs into one, single system that works seamlessly for end-users. Abstracting the data away from the device can actually help here too – rather than tying users to specific devices with isolated storage of data on each one, the business can manage all data assets wherever they happen to be.
 
The consumerisation of cloud storage will see businesses focusing less on managing the infrastructure to contain and hold data; instead, business IT will concentrate more on building out services that bring value by using the volumes of available stored data.