Where will edge computing take us next? Several shifts in 2018 have spurred key changes for next year’s IT staff at the edge. The below list of predictions from StorMagic is focused around three hot topics that will drive the conversation in 2019: Customer demand for automation and high availability, reduced hardware centered on hard disk drive architecture, and the impact of the rising rate of breaches in the news today. Here are our predictions for 2019 and beyond:
1. Increased Automation across IT Solutions
As IT staffs move from several niche specialists to IT generalists, edge solutions must continue to get easier to use and more automated. IT generalists simply have too many tasks to get bogged down troubleshooting products or spending all shift trying to learn and re-learn how to use a piece of technology. IT solutions at the edge will become more intelligent and intuitive, soon becoming as simple to use as an app on your mobile device or smartphone.
2. Three-Node HCI Architectures Evolve
Uptime will be a key IT priority in 2019. IT professionals will ensure redundancy and high availability by integrating three-node clusters at their edge sites. With three nodes available for running applications and for failover, and an independently-running witness server that can be located anywhere, nodes will remain fully protected when taken offline for maintenance or in the case of a node failure.
3. Long Live HDDs
Hard disk drives will be a central component of 2019 edge sites, thanks to software-defined storage (SDS) features that can “guide” data to the right tier by classifying it by the most frequently used. All-flash arrays are great, but often overkill at the edge, and organizations can save a lot of money with spinning disk and smart software. In 2019, an increasing number of hard drives will be used at the edge because of the economics and intelligent software to boost performance.
4. Even More Outages and Breaches
Downtime, data loss and theft events will continue to dominate headlines. Incidences like the YouTube outage and Cathay Airlines breach in 2018 will increase in frequency, forcing IT to focus even more on deploying highly available systems with encryption throughout their organizations. These practices are critical at the edge, where IT staff presence is low and there is often limited or no physical security in place.
5. GDPR, or a similar law, will begin to make its way into the USA
In October 2018, Apple CEO Tim Cook stated that the United States must adopt privacy laws like the EU’s GDPR to eliminate data weaponization. Given the scope of the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica data misuse, and countless other attacks, the time has come to implement a stateside equivalent to the GDPR legislation. USA-based organizations data privacy policies will change dramatically, and storage methods will need to become more secure, to comply with stricter regulations.
What changes did your organization experience at its edge sites in 2018? What direction will edge computing take in 2019? StorMagic sees that IT generalists will strive to make what was once complex, now much simpler to manage and maintain by deploying automated, encryption-ready SDS solutions.
