2017 was a great year in IT bringing much change in the focus of how businesses are consuming IT. For example, cloud for many organization is no longer if, but when. We are also now looking at data analytics, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence in new ways that benefit the business; and not just in ways that great sci-fi movies depict them. These new tools are revolutionizing how we do healthcare, and even simply serve our customers within all business enterprises allowing organizations to take on a more service-based approach. Enough about 2017, it’s time to think about what the technology predictions for 2018 are for enterprises this year.
I reached out to some of the best technology companies out there today with new and innovating products. I asked them to share their thoughts on what’s next within IT, and this is what is on their minds for the new year.
Better Root Cause Analysis:
“As environments become more hybrid, a codeword for complicated, the need for quick root cause analysis becomes more urgent. It’s often much easier to just kill a process or reboot a server to put the fire out. In 2018 we’ll see improved mean time to repair because admins are now better able to combine monitoring and analytics to find true root causes.” –Bassam Khan, Chief Product Advocate of Control Up
Bypassing Containers: The FaaS-tastic Idea!!!:
In the past year, container interest and deployments in modernizing applications significantly increased as enterprises look for more efficient and portable infrastructure services to support continuous integration and continuous delivery. Docker took significant strides to reduce the barrier to consume container services for Enterprises. For instance, Docker added built-in orchestration capabilities, made packaging apps easier, and integrated services with THE two leading cloud service providers – AWS and Microsoft Azure. Not to be outdone, Kubernetes added a multitude of features focused on Enterprises to its feature set around automation, orchestration, and management of containerized applications. But at the end of the day, containers are still a variation of “lift-shift” application migration.
My prediction for 2018 is that many Enterprises will recognize that with the right personnel talent that can directly bypass containers and jump directly in serverless computing aka Functions-as-a-Service. Since Enterprises are already decomposing their applications down to specific functions and microservices, they can avoid the infrastructure services layer, abstract their application code, and bring that code to serverless platforms like AWS Lambda or Microsoft Azure Functions. This will allow them to focus solely on their application code, the quality and quantity of input data, and reducing the barrier to consume their application; thus, maximizing their revenue generating potential. –Kong Yang, Head Geek, Solarwinds
Cloud:
“I think 2018 is the year when the cloud comes into much better focus. Specifically, organizations come to a better understanding of which workloads to run in the cloud and which to run in private datacenters. Generally speaking those that take advantage of elasticity of the IaaS layer and/or services available in the PaaS layer make the best candidates.
For the workloads in the cloud they realize that although the cloud provider is managing the infrastructure for them they still need to manage everything above that. Traditional operational disciplines, albeit updated with devops principles, still apply.
Most importantly 2018 is the year of automation. The combination of web scale and the complexity of public and hybrid cloud models means that IT operations has moved beyond human scale. The demand for management solutions will move beyond basic visibility into powerful automation. “- Charles Crouchman, Chief Technology Officer at Turbonomic
Cloud:
“From a storage perspective, I think what will surprise many is that in 2018 we will see the majority of organizations move away from convergence and instead focus on working with specialist vendors to get the expertise they need. The cloud will be a big part of this, especially as we’re going to see a major shift in public cloud adoption. I believe public cloud implementation has reached a peak, and we will even see a retreat from the public cloud due to hidden costs coming to light and the availability, management and security concerns.” – Gary Watson, Founder and CTO of Nexsan
Cloud:
“Throughout 2017 we have seen many organizations focus on implementing a 100% cloud focused model and there has been a push for complete adoption of the cloud. There has been a debate around on-premises and cloud, especially when it comes to security, performance and availability, with arguments both for and against. But the reality is that the pendulum stops somewhere in the middle. In 2018 and beyond, the future is all about simplifying hybrid IT. The reality is it’s not on-premises versus the cloud. It’s on-premises and the cloud. Using hyperconverged solutions to support remote and branch locations and making the edge more intelligent, in conjunction with a hybrid cloud model, organizations will be able to support highly changing application environments” – said Jason Collier, co-founder at Scale Computing
Cloud:
“2018 will be the year that DR moves from being a secondary issue to a primary focus. The last 12 months have seen mother nature throw numerous natural disasters at us, which has magnified the need for a formal DR strategy. The challenge is that organizations are struggling to find DR solutions that work simply at scale. It’s become somewhat of the white whale to achieve, but there are platforms that are designed to scale and protect workloads wherever they are – on-premises or in the public cloud.” – Chris Colotti, Field CTO at Tintri
Cloud:
In fact, digital transformation in 2017, and looking ahead to 2018, is all about software. The ‘bigger, better, faster, cheaper’ notion of the 90s, largely focused around hardware, is gone. Hardware is commoditized, disposable and simply an access point to software. The focus is squarely on software and unlimited data storage to push us forward. Now the pressure is on the companies building software to continue to lead the way and push us forward.” – Bob Davis, CMO at Plutora
RemoteApps:
“In today’s cloud and mobile-first world, many customers are transitioning from on-premises infrastructure and desktop focused solutions to the public cloud and application-centric services. Business consumers care about easy and secure access to all of their applications and data so they can get stuff done. 2018 and beyond won’t be the year of VDI or DaaS but will be the revival of RemoteApps. Application remoting as a service will be the new normal in delivery of classic Windows application in the End-User Computing industry.
It will power Mobile, Bring Your Own and Windows10/Office365 initiatives and also ignite solutions such as Samsung DeX, Google Chromebook, Microsoft Windows10S and upcoming solutions” -Ruben Spruijt, Field CTO at Frame – Microsoft MVP, NVIDIA GRID advisor, and VMware vExpert
Ransomware:
“In 2017, we saw more than one of the ‘largest ransomware attacks in history’ and yet most companies are still not implementing the necessary strategies to recover from these inevitable attacks quickly and easily. While ransomware attacks in 2017 were widespread and quite consequential for many companies, between 2018-2020 it’s going to become a nightmare of epic proportions. We haven’t seen anything yet in terms of how vastly the threat vectors are changing and will continue to change. And if companies don’t start evolving their IT resilience strategies to keep up, they’ll continue to be hacked and forced to pay ransom or lose critical data. I believe, though, that as companies come to the realization that attacks are inevitable, they’ll finally make moves to fundamentally change their strategies and more efficiently react when attacks happen.” – Harry Smith, Technology Evangelist, Zerto