Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 26 | Page 68

t cht lk TECH TALK Dave Russell, Vice President for Product Strategy at Veeam deployment models for your data will expand with an increasing mix of on- premise, SaaS, IaaS, managed clouds and private clouds. Over time, we expect more of the workload to shift to off-premises, but this transition will take place over years, and we believe that it is important to be ready to meet this new reality today. • Flash memory supply shortages and prices will improve in 2019. According to a report by Gartner in October this year, flash memory supply is expected to revert to a modest shortage in mid- 2019, with prices expected to stabilise largely due to the ramping of Chinese memory production. Greater supply and improved pricing will result in greater use of flash deployment in the operational recovery tier, which typically hosts the most recent 14 days of backup and replica data. We see this greater flash capacity leading to broader usage of instant mounting of backed up machine images (or copy data management). Systems that offer copy data management capability will be able to deliver value beyond availability, along with better business outcomes. Example use cases for leveraging backup and replica data include DevOps, DevSecOps and DevTest, patch testing, analytics and reporting. 68 INTELLIGENTCIO • Predictive analytics will become mainstream and ubiquitous. The predictive analytics market is forecast to reach US$12.41 billion by 2022, marking a 272% increase from 2017, at a CAGR of 22.1%. Predictive analytics based on telemetry data, essentially Machine Learning (ML) driven guidance and recommendations is one of the categories that is most likely to become mainstream and ubiquitous. Machine Learning predictions are not new, but we will begin to see them utilising signatures and fingerprints, containing best practice configurations and policies, to allow the business to get more value out of the infrastructure that you have deployed and are responsible for. Predictive analytics, or diagnostics, will assist us in ensuring continuous operations, while reducing the administrative burden of keeping systems optimised. This capability becomes vitally important as IT organisations are required to manage an increasingly diverse environment, with more data, and with more stringent service level objectives. As predictive analytics become more mainstream, SLAs and SLOs are rising and businesses’ SLEs, Service Level Expectations, are even higher. This means that we need more assistance, and more intelligence in order to deliver on what the business expects from us. • The ‘versatalist’ (or generalist) role will increasingly become the new operating model for the majority of IT organisations. While the first two trends were technology-focused, the future of digital is still analogue: it’s people. Talent shortages combined with new, collapsing on-premises infrastructure and public cloud + SaaS, are leading to broader technicians with background in a wide variety of disciplines, and increasingly a greater business awareness as well. Standardisation, orchestration and automation are contributing factors that will accelerate this, as more capable systems allow for administrators to take a more horizontal view rather than a deep specialisation. Specialisation will of course remain important but as IT becomes more fundamental to business outcomes, www.intelligentcio.com