Santhosh D’Souza, director – Systems Engineering, NetApp India, has shared latest IT trends among Indian businesses.
The world around us is changing every minute. It is becoming hard to predict what innovation will emerge tomorrow. Until a few years ago, we had never heard of Cloud Computing, and today, it seems like no enterprise architecture is complete without a Cloud strategy. It is foolhardy therefore to attempt a set of predictions, without adding a caveat about something totally unforeseen dominating the technology headlines of 2014. That being said, NetApp envisions the following trends to be the themes for 2014.
Cloud Computing: For the past few years, IT organizations have acknowledged that cloud computing delivers concrete benefits, but security and privacy concerns have necessitated largely private cloud initiatives. 2014 will find enterprise platforms beginning to encompass hybrid cloud architectures. Every decision that puts an application in the public cloud means one more application that will never be deployed internally.
The tension within IT around moving to the cloud will resolve as organizations recognize that a hybrid cloud model is needed to serve their application portfolio. CIOs will sort their application portfolio into one set that they must control entirely (in on-premise private clouds), another that they control partially (in enterprise public clouds), and workloads that either involve no data privacy issues or are transient (in public or hyperscalar clouds). IT will function as service providers and architectural mediators across these diverse models.
Abstraction is going to spread from computing to storage, networking and security resources as well – converting all hardware elements into pools of resources that can be utilized by applications and users on demand and at scale. The Software Defined Data Center, with policy-based software control over traditional infrastructure components, will take root in 2014. Virtual versions of infrastructure components – network and storage controllers – become more common. The most valuable virtual components are the ones that cleanly integrate with existing physical network and storage systems, and can offer features and services consistent with those offered by traditional physical controllers.
Internet of Things: The Internet of Things (IoT) will become bigger as more and more devices get connected to the internet. Key elements of the IoT are being embedded in a variety of devices – tiny amounts of intelligence that can, for example, sense changes, track locations, recognize faces and enable financial transactions. The IOT is expected to explode with the advent of wearable devices. The devices we’ve seen so far are intriguing but many are marred by limited capabilities, clunky design and poor battery life. We are going to see in 2014 continued attempts to make wearable technologies – glasses, watches and clothing – into useful consumer devices.
Big Data: Big Data will evolve from analyzing data you have, to driving the collection of new data. As companies derive value from analytics on existing data, they will move to collect additional data that will further their insight. New devices will emerge to gather more data about consumer behaviors, industrial processes, and natural phenomenon. These data sources will be used by existing analytics to improve insight, and will give rise to entirely new analytic applications.
Enterprises will remain big data happy. In a newly released study, International Data Corporation (IDC) forecasts that the Big Data technology and services market will grow at a 27 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) to $32.4 billion through 2017 – or about six times the growth rate of the overall information and communication technology (ICT) market. Although there are multiple scenarios unfolding and many demand and supply variables remain in flux, IDC expects the market to exhibit strong growth over the next five years.
Converged Infrastructure: Clustered Storage, Converged Infrastructure, Object Storage, In-Memory Databases all continue their momentum in 2014. Several technology trends that built momentum in 2013 will continue to grow. Clustered storage adoption accelerates and scale-out, unified protocol architectures will become the de facto data platform choice. Converged Infrastructure becomes the most compelling building block of datacenter infrastructure. Object Storage will begin to enter the enterprise main-stream as applications that monetize vast capacities of data objects gather momentum.
