Trends 2019: Five recommendations for IT decision makers

Business processes are becoming more flexible through digitization, and operational efficiency is increasing. If companies want to remain competitive in the future and offer their customers reliable and innovative services, intelligent data management will become indispensable. To that end, Dave Russell, vice president of product strategy at Veeam, identified five trends IT decision makers should consider in 2019:

Multi-cloud prevails

Globalization, cross-border business processes and digitization make the use of multi-cloud infrastructures almost inevitable. Analysts expect around 10 percent annual growth in the cloud sector in the coming years. This will not make on-premises solutions superfluous, but will increasingly result in a mix of on-prem, SaaS, IaaS, managed clouds and private clouds.

Increased use of flash memory

Gartner expects flash storage supply to tighten somewhat in mid-2019, but prices to remain stable. We expect to see greater flash usage for the operational recovery tier, which typically holds backup data and replicas from the last fortnight. Due to flash proliferation, we also expect increased use of instantaneous recovery of complete virtual machines (or copy data management).

Systems with copy data management functionality offer complementary added value that goes beyond pure availability: Examples of the additional use of backup and replica data include DevOps, DevSecOps and DevTest as well as patch testing, analytics and reporting.

Predictive analytics are on the rise

According to forecasts, the predictive analytics market will increase by 272 percent by 2022 compared to 2017, an annual growth of around 22 percent. Predictive analytics based on telemetry data for predictions and recommendations built on machine learning (ML) are most likely to gain widespread acceptance.

PRedictive analytics and diagnostics support smooth IT operations and reduce the effort required for system optimization. Against the background of increasingly complex infrastructures with more data and higher performance requirements, they are becoming essential. SLEs, Service Level Expectations, will continue to rise, so IT needs more performance data and projections.

IT generalists are in demand

AI or not - even the data center of the future cannot do without people. A shortage of skilled workers combined with increasingly hybrid infrastructures require the "IT generalist" with knowledge and experience from different specialist areas as well as an understanding of business management. Standardization, orchestration and automation will accelerate this trend: Due to the increasing "self-intelligence" of systems, specialization is less in demand than broad basic knowledge.

Of course, specialized knowledge remains important, especially when it comes to the cloud. But the more IT becomes part of the operational value chain, the more important it is that IT professionals also understand the business environment in order to create added value.

5G offers new opportunities for the industry

The first 5G-capable cell phones will be launched at the beginning of 2019. In the context of Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things (IoT), companies in particular have a great interest in the transmission technology, including for their own regional networks. Nevertheless, 2019 will primarily be about creating the conditions for widespread use so that Europe can become a "gigabit society".

In the medium term, 5G offers new revenue opportunities for retailers and cloud service providers. The processing of larger volumes of data in real time, new hardware and device requirements, and new applications for managing the data open up a wide range of opportunities and will also promote the discussion about edge computing.

Source: Veeam