EDITOR’S QUESTION
Gregg Petersen
Regional Director, Middle East
and SAARC, Veeam Software
1) The Criticality of Availability: In 2016, the Internet
of Things brings availability to the fore. The rise of
mobile and connected devices demonstrates that there
is zero tolerance for downtime. All organisations – from
a consumer facing business, a mobile service provider or
the stock market, the days of organisations being able to
suffer through any downtime are long gone. Even a slight
outage of a few hours will cause everyone involved in
the business to be unhappy that they don’t have access,
but more importantly, businesses will lose money, data,
respect of employees, credibility from partners and loyalty
of customers, doing potential damage to consumer and
investor confidence. As the Internet of Things continues to
gather momentum, the potential cost of downtime is set
to escalate. Minimising downtime and data loss is critical
to the overall health of all businesses and ensuring the
end user remains satisfied. In addition, since more data
and services are now both on premises and in the cloud,
businesses in 2016 will need to ensure they have strategies
to backup, protect and restore their data on all fronts.
2) Legacy Thinking, Applications and Systems Must
Not Stifle Innovation: The industry has seen significant
growth in the capabilities of infrastructure and delivery
models, but many organizations haven’t modernized
their application footprint in alignment with the velocity
of the changes to technologies around these legacy
applications. Over the next year, companies will draw the
line and migrate to the next generation of application
technologies to keep up with competitors. There are clear
advantages to making use of the newest infrastructure
and application technologies, but there have been some
blockages in the past. For example, current staff may be
entrenched; or legacy applications may be foreseen to be
“required forever”. Today there are techniques to modernize
nearly any application, and for the legacy applications that
need to be held around for retention reasons, infrastructure
technologies today can keep obsolete operating systems
and applications online. This migration to the next
generation of applications will not be easy for some
businesses, but will be worth it to deliver on the bottom line.
www.intelligentcio.com
Companies will see new benefits from an IT perspective;
but also have a unique opportunity to re-evaluate their
business. Migrating away from these systems will enable
businesses to offer new services that meet the demand of
an Always-On workforce and customer base.
3) Big Data Will Appear to Shrink: harnessing
and capitalizing on big data will remain critical for
businesses, but as the cost of storage continues
to fall, it will become the norm over next year. Big
data will drop its “big” label and instead come to be
viewed simply as data to be harnessed effectively for
customers, partners and staff. Businesses will be able
to increasingly focus on interfaces and connecting
end users to data, further elevating the importance of
availability of service delivery. It’s expected that 2016
will see increased adoption of virtual reality (Oculus,
Microsoft Hololens), motion-based interfaces, speech
recognition and 3D printing as a means to manufacture.
For business, the IT interface is changing too: in the face
of explosive data growth, traditional data management
techniques no longer apply. The operator interface will
focus increasingly on automation and data lifecycle
management to ensure the right data is in the hands of
the right person at the right time.
4) The Emergence of Disaster Recovery-as-aService: As cloud-based infrastructure continues to
become the de facto standard for businesses, we’re
seeing new service offerings grow in popularity and
market share. For example, many companies are
increasingly implementing cloud-based Security as a
Service within their business to help combat cyberattacks
and ensure business continuity. Veeam predicts Disaster
Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) to be a game changer in
2016, as it will enable businesses to meet and exceed
customer and employee expectations around availability.
As businesses place IT and availability at the center
of their operations, we can expect to see service level
agreements with guaranteed backup and recovery times
becoming the standard for the modern enterprise.
INTELLIGENTCIO
75