This is the time of year when everyone is either talking about their New Year’s Resolutions or discussing 2016 market predictions. And, more than anything else, it seems like the information technology sector has the most blog posts and articles discussing what they believe 2016 top trends will look like.
I’ve read through many of those predictions – and even shared some of them on the EMC Twitter handles. Here are some of the predictions that have been capturing people’s attention in the twittersphere:
- Forbes Magazine wrote an article on IDC’s top 10 predictions for 2016 which made the dramatic claim that “companies will need to transform or die”. Two big themes from this article were “scale will be critical to digital success” and “digital transformation will drive everything that matters in IT”.
- Cloud Tweaks published their 6 major tech predictions that will have an impact. Those 6 predictions are:
- The death of the password
- Chip-to-cloud protection will be the new normal
- New technologies and standards that enable consumer privacy and security will become a competitive differentiator
- The evolving Internet of Things (IoT) will change the way we interact
- Tagging data at source will multiply the value of Big Data
- The fight to become the “Amazon” of IoT will intensify
- Our own Core Blog predicts cloudy skies with clearing complexity through three distinct channels: Flash, Hybrid Cloud, and the collision of the worlds of primary storage and protection storage.
There were many, many more articles sharing 2016 IT predictions, and they continue to be posted daily, but these were the ones that stuck with me. The future is so bright with the continued development of technology every aspect of our lives becomes part of the sea of big data and the IoT phenomenon. After 2015 being the year of the hacker, storage is going to have to wear data protection shades; and that protection will need to be a major focus in order to keep company and personal data highly secure. These 2016 prediction articles have all mentioned that data protection is important. However, the articles did not deep dive in to the how or what’s to be expected on the protection front in 2016. I decided to ask some of the members of my data protection team here at EMC what they thought. This is how they responded:
- Caitlin Gordon, Director of Product Marketing for EMC, predicts that in 2016 the rapid adoption of flash storage will force businesses to re-examine their data protection strategies. Traditional server-centric backup solutions are built for an era of computing that is rapidly disappearing. They are too slow, too complex and too expensive to keep up in a world driven by increasingly tighter SLAs and a shrinking protection window. All-flash arrays will drive new conversations about transforming data protection to meet the performance and efficiency required by mission critical apps in this environment.
- Dave Robinson, Senior Director of Product Marketing for EMC Data Protection Cloud, expects the adoption of cloud services including SaaS, BaaS, and IaaS to continue to grow in line with analyst predictions. But, one trend Dave sees playing out next year, which isn’t being talked about, is the need for Enterprises to protect Database as a Service (DBaaS) as they adopt it in lieu of managing their own instances of SQL or NoSQL databases. SaaS applications such as Office365, Salesforce.com and ServiceNow are the first foray into the public cloud for many enterprises. As enterprises leverage the public cloud for custom-built applications, DBaaS becomes a natural fit, as it places the focus on application development while reducing the need to maintain an underlying database platform. This also means that many of these managed cloud databases are beyond the reach of traditional protection solutions but are vital to the business and need critical protection.
- Data Protection companies will need to produce amazing new products for changing the way customers and partners think about protecting and managing their electronic data, says Sherry Davenport, Senior Manager of Product Marketing for EMC Data Protection. These products need to show how the combination of purpose-built data movers, deep cloud-based analytics, unified management and workflow, and global search across the backup and archiving repositories, allow for protection of data wherever it lives, no matter what happens.
As Timbuk 3 sang in the 80’s “I’m doing alright, getting good grades, the future’s so bright, gotta wear shades”. The future is SO bright for data that your storage, for sure, is going to need to wear those data protection shades!