Veeam

Julian Quinn

The rise of the Internet of Things, coupled with globalisation, the adoption of cloud services, virtualisation and increasing mobility has heralded the emergence of the ‘Always-On Enterprise™’. This is an era where our agile mobile workforce and demanding consumer expectations have created a world where constant access to products and services across time zones is the norm.

With analytics moving to the fore and an ever increasing number of businesses focused on delivering services across what Gartner calls ‘The Device Mesh’ - an expanding set of endpoints people use to access applications and information or interact with people, social communities, governments and businesses -  the pressure on today’s IT infrastructure is ever-growing.

In the virtualization industry, we are well in the direction where advanced storage and Cloud come together to make the Always-On enterprise a reality. In fact, we are very strong believers that the best way to predict the future is to build it. For 2016, here are some thoughts for technology, cloud and the enterprise data center for the year.

Firstly, we foresee that 2016 will be the biggest year for IT acquisitions. Last year, the industry saw the biggest year in history of IT acquisition which accounted for a total of USD$571 billion. This year, bigger things are expected – fueled byvendors fear of being left behind as companies seek to become dominant players in their markets.

The cloud will accelerate at a pace which will overtake large legacy technology vendors. For example, the Dell-EMC merger and the Symantec split were forced by the rise of the cloud – at least in part. We can expect even more disruption in the industry for 2016.

To continue to remain relevant, the big three clouds; Azure, Google and Amazon will focus and rely heavily on forming parnerships to drive consumption. For example, Microsoft which has led the way by forming Azure partnerships with ISVs (independent software vendors) and infrastructure vendors at a rapid pace. These partnerships focus on driving cloud adoption to grow at a triple digit pace.

In 2016, we expect that massive data growth will continue – more than 50 percent in fact. Further, the number of workloads on-premises as well as workloads in the cloud will grow at an even faster rate.

As industry players level up their overall expertise this year, we feel that container companies willfollowsuit too. However, they are still too green to become a serious force. Instead, look to 2017 or 2018 for containers to shine through and show a big impact on business IT.

Overall, we see the industry as constantly evolving but one thing will remain – the need for businesses to remain always-on. In fact, we see this becoming the norm in 2016, while availability will become the determining factor for success. Organisations must implement technologies that correspond with modern and immediate demands, establishing the foundation that creates availability for always-on enterprise.