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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.
Dave Russell, Vice
President for Product
Strategy at Veeam
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, 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 backgrounds
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
and more fundamental to business
outcomes, it stands to reason that IT
talent will likewise need to understand
the wider business and add value across
many IT domains.
www.intelligentcio.com
Yet, while we see these trends challenging
the status quo next year, some things will
not change. There are always constants
in the world, and we see two major
factors that will remain top-of-mind for
companies everywhere….
• Frustration with legacy backup
approaches and solutions
The top three vendors in the market
continue to lose market share in 2019.
In fact, the largest provider in the
market has been losing share for 10
years. Companies are moving away
from legacy providers and embracing
more agile, dynamic, disruptive vendors,
such as Veeam, to offer the capabilities
that are needed to thrive in the data-
driven age.
• The pain points of the Three Cs: Cost,
complexity and capability
These Three Cs continue to be why people
in data centres are unhappy with solutions
from other vendors. Broadly speaking,
these are excessive costs, unnecessary
complexity and a lack of capability, which
manifests as speed of backup, speed of
restoration or instant mounting to a virtual
machine image. These three major criteria
will continue to dominate the reasons why
organisations augment or fully replace
their backup solution.
• The arrival of the first 5G networks
will create new opportunities for
resellers and CSPs to help collect,
manage, store and process the higher
volumes of data
In early 2019 we will witness the first
5G-enabled handsets hitting the market
at CES in the US and MWC in Barcelona.
I believe 5G will likely be most quickly
adopted by businesses for Machine-to-
Machine communication and Internet
of Things (IoT) technology. Consumer
mobile network speeds have reached a
point where they are probably as fast as
most of us need with 4G.
2019 will be more about the technology
becoming fully standardised and tested,
and future-proofing devices to ensure
they can work with the technology when
it becomes more widely available, and
EMEA becomes a truly Gigabit Society.
For resellers and cloud service providers,
excitement will centre on the arrival
of new revenue opportunities leveraging
5G or infrastructure to support it.
Processing these higher volumes of
data in real-time, at a faster speed,
new hardware and device requirements,
and new applications for managing
data will all present opportunities and
will help facilitate conversations around
edge computing. n
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