INTELLIGENT DATA CENTRES
Rick Vanover, Director of Product
Strategy, Veeam.
time is not acceptable. This recognition
has led to highly available designs running
on virtualised infrastructures. However,
many of the natural disasters around the
world in 2017 have raised the concern that
single datacentre design is not sufficient.
This concern, coupled with the cost
of running active-active configurations
across multiple data centres, will cause
an exponential growth of replication to
the cloud for the purposes of failover.
The cloud has always provided excellent
return on investment for variable load
services, and disaster recovery is no
exception. This will lead to hockey stick
growth of cloud replication to fill a critical
business need in 2018.
Data recovery automation will
not move mainstream
As an extension of cloud replication, many
organisations will realise that recovery
time objectives are very much dependent
upon the orchestration and automation of
recovery. Having a backup of the data, or
replicating the data to a cloud provider is
not sufficient to maintain minimal RTOs.
This will cause forward thinking
enterprise and service organisations to focus
on orchestration and automation as an
essential component of business availability.
These test plans will be designed, tested,
Danny Allan, Vice President for Product
Strategy, Veeam.
documented and run on a regular schedule
to provide attestation of the readiness for
data recovery. However, data recovery
automation will not cross the chasm into
mainstream adoption through 2018.
Data ownership and privacy will
gain Board-level visibility
Recent years and high visibility
data breaches such as Equifax have
increased security concerns to the Board
level. However, in 2018, the pending
enforcement of the General Data
Protection Regulation and customer
privacy concerns will raise the visibility
and focus on data ownership. It will no
longer be sufficient to depend upon SaaS
services to ensure customer privacy, or
for existing security implementations to
enable data ownership and privacy rights.
End users and customers will demand
the right to be forgotten, the right to be
informed of data breaches, and the right
to withdrawn consent. These demands will
put a focus on data ownership and privacy
rights. In 2018, we will see a distinct set of
controls and Board level visibility on this
emerging area of compliance.
Bi-directional cloud
workload migration
Cloud vendors tout the eventual
migration of all workloads to cloud, while
virtualisation and hardware vendors
speak of multi-cloud. In 2018, we will see
significant one-way migration towards
cloud in one specific area: Software
as a Service. The simplicity of SaaS
services such as corporate email systems,
collaboration, HR, CRM and payroll will
lead to a one-way cloud migration.
From a cost, efficiency and expertise
perspective, it no longer makes sense
to run these SaaS services on-premises.
However, IaaS workloads will see a mix
of migration both to and from the cloud.
Many enterprises will quickly learn that
migrating enterprises services to the IaaS
cloud increases cost while delivering
minimal additional benefits when the
workloads are not variable.
Leveraging the cloud as a business
tool rather than a destination will lead to
the re-patriotisation of workloads after
an initial trial. This bi-directional IaaS
movement will continue through 2018 as
the enterprise discover and put a renewed
focus on where and why cloud adoption is
most appropriate.
Increasing focus on
data enablement
Data protection and data security have
been a core focus of every IT organisation
for the past several decades. This has
always been a cost centre and expense
for the business that has been driven by
compliance and regulatory pressures.
However, in 2018, we will see an
increasing focus on how this same data
content can be turned into a business
enablement asset.
Investigation into data use for
development operations, patch testing,
analysis of data sets through machine
learning and other emerging techniques
will lead to data being used for positive
business value rather than solely as an
insurance policy for negative outcomes.
Data enablement will drive business value
and cause the enterprise to re-evaluate
existing storage models.
37