The end of another year signals an opportunity to reflect on lessons learned and outline expectations for the next 12 months.
In 2018, we saw the growth of software-actuated infrastructures, ongoing data breaches and security vulnerabilities, and a continuation of organizations experimenting with an increasing number of cloud-hosted technologies, from microservices to serverless (Functions as a Service), and even artificial intelligence-enabled, cloud-based systems management.
So, what’s in store for 2019? Here is a sampling of the trends our team at SolarWinds predict are set to drive IT industry developments in the year ahead.
Battle for the Cloud: The Scramble to Engage Enterprise Customers
As public cloud adoption becomes more mainstream, cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, and Google will likely find themselves in a “mad scramble” to gain additional enterprise/on-premises customers. Now, enterprises are in the midst of migrating applications into the technology stack, both in the cloud and on-premises. With this trend, tools that help facilitate app migration and detangling will be a focus in 2019. Some providers, such as AWS, have already begun leading the charge, offering their own proprietary software to handle and automatically monitor app migration.
In 2019, public cloud providers will begin implementing new strategies and tactics to gain enterprise customers, reintroducing cloud and the tech it offers as they pursue enterprise markets.
The Year of DataOps and the Rise of Data-Driven, Data-First Organizations
All DevOps strategies have universal goals: agility, faster deployment, increased end-user experience, and “smart” operational decision-making. With DevOps transitioning from a hype to a standard practice in agile IT departments, technology and operations professionals striving to add value to their businesses should consider the next step in enhancing their departments: DataOps.
In today’s increasingly digital world, data cannot be excluded from the agile decision-making process. In fact, we predict that 2019 will be the year that data is recognized as a key business driver. “Data Culture” will become increasingly implemented into tech environments, and organizations will become data-driven and data-first. This shift will also give rise to DataOps as traditional admins start to understand that their days of tuning indexes are ending, one page at a time. Operations teams must adopt a “data mindset” to discern the type of data that exceeds their department and can be polished into something that adds value to the business overall. With DataOps, organizations can begin to transition their IT team into a data science team, as they adopt a data-first frame of mind.
DataOps can help the C-suite operate their businesses more effectively by extracting and analyzing the most pertinent pieces of data and distilling and crafting them into a compelling and “business-digestible” narrative that can be easily understood across the organization. Companies will begin to actuate on this data, not just report and track in Excel—they will start using valuable data to make more informed decisions. The ability to share this actionable, business-digestible narrative may even earn tech pros a seat at the strategy table.
A Programmer’s Paradise
Despite its transformative potential, automation is still too often perceived as a significant threat to technology professionals’ careers. However, in 2019, we expect that tech pros will realize that contrary to widespread “automation anxiety,” they can automate themselves into a job rather than out of a job. As a result, we will see a dramatic acceleration of programming culture at organizations that have not experimented in this space before.
Many technology professionals working within a hybrid environment are already on the cusp of this transition, as the ability to use a GUI, CLI, or an API to manage cloud workloads is driving greater competency in automation and advanced scripting skills. As admins support ever more cloud workloads, we’ll see a greater number of tech pros become successful at using APIs, GUIs, and CLIs to define not only networks, storage, and services, but a number of other processes, such as managing container queues. At the same time, automation technology will also deliver significant benefits to tech pros who are focused on the systems side of the house, who must begin to think more in terms of command-line actions and transition to an automation and orchestration-led way of doing things.
Ultimately, as tech professionals—especially those working at small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs)—become more enlightened by the transformative potential of automation tools, we expect they will simultaneously identify opportunities to automate a variety of processes. The growth of conferences like DevNet at Cisco Live! — which will dominate nearly 75% of next year’s Cisco Live! event—is proof positive that 2019 will be a programmer’s paradise.
Conclusion
Of course, what we’ve laid out above is by no means an exhaustive list of the potential changes we may see emerge in the year ahead, but is instead a selection of trends we anticipate will significantly move the needle of the industry next year. We look forward to watching these trends and products evolve in 2019, as well as seeing how IT professionals gain new skills to execute on these new technologies.
