If 2020 taught us anything, it’s that no amount of planning can protect organizations from the unforeseen.
But one fact is clear, moving to the cloud can deliver the resiliency, flexibility and cost controls businesses need to survive—and thrive in the months ahead.
As IT leaders look at their 2021 plans, what cloud technologies and trends should be top of mind? Where should they place their bets as they consider their budgets and resources?
DBTA recently held a webinar featuring Peter Berry, Navisite’s CTO of cloud technologies, who reviewed the top five cloud trends to watch in 2021.
This year was one filled with unexpected transformation, Berry said, because of the COVID-19 pandemic organizations had to shift their business and cost model overnight. There was a major pullback on IT spending except for the cloud.
The first trend he predicts for 2021 is the permanence of remote work. Organizations are looking to implement more permanent remote workforce solutions and the growth of public cloud solutions has proven out with fast deployment and scalability.
Next year will see greater focus on costs, management, and maximizing value, he said. This will address pain points – security, BYOD, automation, mobile access and see greater customization of users and performance to rethinking the physical office.
The second trend he foresees is the acceleration of cloud-native projects. COVID highlighted drawbacks of hybrid IT which includes lagging time to respond to changes in the business, lift-and-shift deployments remain tied to legacy systems and there is limited integration and insight across the business, he said.
Organizations are looking to take advantage of modern hardware and cloud native features of the hyperscale cloud. Expect to see an uptick in refactoring despite upfront investment.
The third trend for next year Berry predicts is analytics going cloud-first. Hyperscale cloud delivers on framework for big data. It is suited to growing unstructured data: social media, images, video, etc., can commoditize the edge device to aggregate data from anywhere, and exabyte -scale storage is a checkbox on public cloud.
IT teams become business specialists is the fourth prediction, Berry explained. 2021 will see increasing adoption of new service-based staffing models to dynamically scale teams and expertise based on current need. Internal teams increasingly domain experts in the business and 2021 will see them focus on upskilling workforce, he said.
His last prediction is cloud optimization taking center stage. Cost optimization needs to be an ongoing process, he said. This requires dedicated FinOps expertise. New tools are making it easier to manage.
To further prepare for 2021 he recommends:
- Creating a cloud competency center of excellence
- Taking an objective view of the IT landscape
- Conduct a skills assessment for your team
- Pick your first easy workload
An archived on-demand replay of this webinar is available here.