2019 IT Trend Story by StorageCraft

These predictions were written by Douglas Brockett, president, StorageCraft Technology Corp., and former CEO of Exablox.

 
Petabyte era
Petabyte-size data management used to be a challenge only large enterprises would face. With data growing ten-fold – according to IDC – the petabyte era will start barreling down on mid-sized organizations too. What used to be an anomaly, will start to become the norm for SMBs and mid-size organizations. Mid-sized organizations in particular will find their IT architectures simply can’t scale with their data growth. Unlike large enterprises, they won’t have the skills or budget to cope either. The demand to bring data management, protection and cost-effective scale out storage into a single frictionless environment will rise. The benefits will be far-reaching: operational complexity will be eliminated, costly over-provisioning of storage will become a thing of the past, intelligent automation with features such as ‘set and forget’ SLAs will create improve RTOs and RPOs. 
 
Silos will collapse and converge
With the explosive rate of data growth, the current approach to fragmented storage, management and protection will be untenable. IT fragmentation with a multitude of point-products has created silos, complexity, vulnerability and out-of-control storage costs. Data silos will have to collapse. If not, IT infrastructures will buckle under the weight of their own data. While the market is already moving toward converged data management and protection solutions, the convergence criteria will shift. Unlike legacy approaches that simply converge secondary and backup environments, convergence will encompass the entire data environment including primary, secondary, on-prem, off-prem, private and public cloud as well as data management and protection. With multiple technology stacks collapsed into a single, frictionless and converged infrastructure, organizations will be able to achieve immense business value. Data compliance, digital transformation and business agility will be far easier to attain.
 
Bifurcated Cloudification
IDC estimates 40% of organizations have moved some workloads and data back from the cloud to on-prem because of cost, performance and continuity concerns. Rather than press pause on the cloudification of data infrastructures, organizations will instead recognize the benefit of a bifurcated or hybrid cloud strategy. Advanced data management will intelligently push and pull workloads to and from the cloud. The blended and intelligent deployment of public and private cloud services will deliver on the promises of unparalleled cost, scale, data management and data protection benefits – and total BC. Public cloud will deliver the cost and scale businesses need as they operate in increasingly virtual environments and adoption of Microsoft Office 365 becomes commonplace in businesses.