It’s that time of year where we all start to weigh in on predictions for the future in technology.  We are all looking forward to 2021 with new and renewed hope, and optimism around change and moving forward back to some form of normal assimilation.  With that in mind for navigating the day to day, we have compiled some great predictions for you around tech.  Check them out below and share your own predictions in the comments section.

Predictions for the Future in Technology – The list!

Organizations will continue moving their desktops and workspaces to the Cloud to enable their workforce to work from home.

Jason E. Smith, VP Product Marketing, Liquidware  When writing my 2020 prediction last year – Cloud desktops and workspaces gain good traction while even more on-prem desktops leverage cloud services – who would have thought how the Covid-19 pandemic would change the whole world in the way it has? But it made my prediction quite prescient in hindsight. We have witnessed many organizations moving their desktops and workspaces to the Cloud to enable their workforce to work from home.

2021 will see even more of this as organization continue to allow their employees to work remotely. Utilizing the Cloud to ‘burst scale’ remote desktops as required will give organizations the flexibility and cost-efficiencies to ensure a great user experience. At Liquidware, we see the Cloud as being your briefcase, desk and, eventually, your office.

 

Double Down on Database Performance Management

Thomas LaRock, Head Geek, Solarwinds Let’s face it: applications run the business—but applications run on data. Since 2006, the industry has been referring to data as the new oil. It’s what gives businesses a competitive advantage, making the need to protect and optimize its performance of the utmost importance to give the highest value back to the business. Visibility is critical because database performance is often where the experience goes wrong.

In 2021, it’s time to double down on database performance management. Ensuring your database performance in the cloud is at least as good as it is in your data center is critical as IT organizations “lift and shift” more workloads to the cloud—something that’s been accelerating since the workforce went remote. Otherwise, the digital transformation you expect to deliver for your business can suffer, bringing your business down with it. Because the database is critical to infrastructure and application performance, IT pros and business leaders have to strike the right balance for their organization’s growth, and grapple with making their data perform its best, regardless of where it resides. And while many look at either the applications, or the infrastructure supporting them, the data management itself is a top priority.”

Linux at the Edge Goes Mainstream

Simon Townsend, CMO, IGEL Along with the need to remain workplace-agile, companies will take a fresh look at the value of Linux-powered endpoints. With lower cost, greater security, flexible manageable and high performance – even for the most video-intensive applications – Linux-based edge devices are favored by even Microsoft for accessing workspaces in the cloud, particularly those based on Windows Virtual Desktop. Linux-enabled solutions, such as the IGEL UD Pocket, were also among the most valuable tools for supporting workers when they needed to move home literally overnight – something not nearly as easily executed using a mix-match of Windows systems. Into 2021, as workforces embrace a hybrid workplace, Linux will benefit from increasing mainstream appeal as it is easier to manage, cheaper to support and dramatically more secure when compared to Windows-based devices.

From Cloud-first, to cloud smart. EUC is leading the way!

Ruebn Spruijt, Sr. Technologist Nutanix Do you know why “born in the cloud solutions” Microsoft Azure and AWS have their own on-prem solutions–Azure Stack Hub and Amazon Outposts–as core elements in their infrastructure solutions? Also, why are Nutanix and VMware solutions delivering hybrid cloud infrastructure, creating an integrated infrastructure solution to make the user and admin experience frictionless? The reason is simple. The future of infrastructure is hybrid, because the laws of physics, economics, and land apply in 2021 and beyond.

Hybrid cloud is widely considered the ideal IT operating model because it’s imperative to be able to run applications and workloads in the optimal cloud, as determined by requirements such as location, costs, regulation, performance, availability, and guaranteed capacity

As all of us in the end user computing industry know, the best application and user experience is achieved when applications and data are close to each other. Also, users and administrators have the best experience when the Desktop as a Service (DaaS) solution is built from the ground up with consumer grade simplicity as a top design principle. Consumer grade simplicity is a DaaS superpower few vendors can master–challenge your partner and vendor to see if they have truly mastered this superpower!

In 2021 and beyond, more and more IT professionals will choose “Cloud Smart” over Cloud First.” Public cloud strategy must be driven by use-case, ROI/TCO impact, solution limitations, sizing impact, and key details such as storage performance impact and GPU options in public-cloud–the same considerations you have on-premises. EUC is leading the way to cloud smart, are you 1st or smart?

IT Pros Turn to Embedded Intelligence & Automation to Support Remote Workers

Stacy Leidwinger, Chief Marketing Officer Goliath Technologies In 2021, IT Pros will turn to software with embedded intelligence and automation to monitor and troubleshoot end-user experience with remote workers. The sudden surge in remote workers in 2020 exposed the inherent complexities to deliver a seamless user experience. More than 15 different technologies must work in concert from the endpoint, the WIFI connection, delivering the applications (often Citrix or VMware Horizon), and a variety of other backend and host systems. Most solutions historically lack the end-to-end visibility across all of these different technologies, thus the need for purpose-built software that can automatically discover the IT infrastructure, identify what to monitor, alert when thresholds are exceeded, and execute self-healing to resolve user issues regardless of where the workers or workloads are located.

 

2021 – Workloads, Workspaces and the coming nightmare of Workflow

John Worthington, Director of Customer Success eG Innovations We’ve been hell-bent on moving workloads to the cloud for some time now. The Cisco Global Cloud Index (2016-2021) suggested that “94% of all workloads will be cloud-based and/or virtualized by 2021“. So, this can no longer really be what we could call a ‘trend’. But the hybrid, multi-cloud future certainly seems like it will have arrived by 2021. So, this isn’t really a ‘prediction’ anymore.

The pandemic has “seen the US workplace undergo its largest and most sudden transformation since the start of WWII.” (Forbes Technology Council). This trend is not going to go away either; “the days of having an entire team show up in the same office at the same time will soon be — and perhaps already are — in our past.” (Harvard Business Review) This isn’t really a ‘prediction’ either.

Nor can the importance of the digital experience. “…as competition and buyer empowerment compounds, customer experience itself is proving to be the only truly durable competitive advantage.” (Gartner) This ‘trend’ has also been underway for years now and will only accelerate. But workflows will put all these past (and still evolving) ‘trends’ into overdrive. The ‘automation’ craze will finally be brought to the masses, and those that have not found a way to effectively and efficiently manage the performance of complex, heterogeneous and multi-cloud ecosystems will suffer immeasurably.

For many working in IT, 2021 will be a time when the forces of managing workloads, workspaces and workflows converge while digital experience is raising the bar to remain competitive. Those that can strike an effective balance between keeping site/application performance at high levels, and targeting automation where it most benefits external customers, will be the most successful.

Wrapping Up our Predictions for the Future!

It will be interesting for us all to check back in on these later in 2021 to see which of these predictions will have come true, if any are no longer valid and which of these predictions will still be in progress.  Be sure to check back in later this year on these predictions for the future.

Check out last years for fun!