In 2019, it is all systems go and full steam ahead. In a thriving but unpredictable economic environment, digital businesses continue to expand — in terms of geography, size, complexity, and IT maturity. Optimizing the management of hybrid cloud and containerized deployments becomes increasingly important as more on-premise infrastructure moves to private and public cloud.
To get the most out of hybrid environments, orchestration capabilities will need to be matured and refined. Protecting data, business operations, and customers will require higher degrees of control, visibility, and automation.
In 2019, many businesses will accelerate their digital transformation investments and activity, with increased focus on modernizing their architecture and storage. We think the critical factors will be container-centric storage, cloud standardization, and data governance and security.
Time to streamline and standardize migrations, workflows, and orchestration
As companies ramp up their deployments to public cloud infrastructure, they are seeking ways to make migrations more efficient and reliable. They require the ability to run existing distributed applications on public cloud without changing the application or associated workflow. When moved to public cloud, applications should look and work the same; the user shouldn’t have to relearn anything, or even care about the underlying infrastructure.
For example, cloud storage should be deployed so that it looks like local storage and users can’t tell the difference. Enabling this requires a layer of abstraction. Compute, networking, and storage need to work seamlessly together in hybrid deployments. We recommend following — and contributing to — software defined storage standards development.
The same will be true for multi-cloud deployments once they emerge into mainstream use. There are not yet strong use cases for the practice of running distributed applications across multiple public cloud infrastructure providers with no on-premise component. Many are being explored, including the need to meet specific geography-delineated regulatory requirements. In 2019, multi-cloud will remain a hot topic of conversation, and we think it’s wise to follow those who are working to identify meaningful, effective ways of deploying and orchestrating it. Once the industry optimizes hybrid cloud environments, multi-cloud will be a logical next step.
Containers have arrived, and now you need persistent storage
Containers are finally becoming production ready. As the next big thing in virtualization and resource utilization, they are now being used for mission-critical applications. We’ll see a major increase in production deployment containers in 2019, which raises the profile of associated challenges like storage. Containers require persistent storage in order to succeed in mainstream use cases.
Most current storage solutions cater to virtualization vendor platforms (VMware, etc.) but aren’t a great fit for container technology. In 2019, the problem to solve for is finding one storage solution to support these completely independent virtualization mechanisms so that they can co-exist efficiently. From the application point of view, they are different mechanisms, but that shouldn’t matter when it comes to storage. Making progress on this aspect of container deployment will bring much-needed simplification to this infrastructure option.
Data governance and security challenges aren’t going away
In mid-2018, the European Union’s sweeping consumer data privacy legislation went into effect and catalyzed increased discussion and action around governing and protecting data at rest and in motion. The heat and attention sparked by breaches and sophisticated identity and data manipulation schemes at Facebook, Google, Twitter, and many other major digital players is certain to inspire further regulations. Additional countries and states are already considering tougher privacy mandates and penalties. Companies are getting serious about data protection practices now that European regulators are getting serious about levying GDPR penalties.
For storage providers, this means they need to have the right answers about data security guarantees and the ability to sustain and strengthen best practices. The guarantees include: if the data be accessed, stolen, or leaked, no one will be able to use it or make sense of it; data integrity must be preserved without fail; and data must abide by country-specific data location restrictions (for example, Chinese Internet regulations).
Storage designed with distributed systems in mind makes it possible to quickly provision application specific, policy-based data services. Trust (or lack of it) is becoming a major factor in enterprise digital transformation and brand reputation management. In 2019, infrastructure teams and leadership should carefully consider the significant role storage plays in maintaining public trust and the integrity of data systems used in commercial, industrial, and social settings.
Maintaining the accelerating trajectory toward digital transformation, innovation, and growth while also building trust, protecting data and systems, and optimizing for cost and efficiency is a tall order. Ensuring that distributed applications and business processes run as smoothly as possible is job number one. We believe software-defined storage is a critical factor in meeting the unique set of cloud deployment challenges each IT team is sure to face in the year ahead.
