Eight technology trends that are set to soar in 2020

By Dave Russell, Vice President of Enterprise Strategy, Veeam Software and Sandeep Bhambure, Vice President and Managing Director, India & SAARC, Veeam Software

Throughout 2019, technology has continued to have a transformative impact on Indian businesses and communities. From the first deployments of 5G to businesses getting to grips with how they use artificial intelligence (AI), it’s been another year of rapid progress. As a testament to this, the digital economy today comprises 14-15% of India’s total economy, and is targeted to reach 20% by 2024.

From an IT perspective, we have seen two major trends that will continue in 2020. The first is that on-premises and public cloud will increasingly become equal citizens. Cloud is becoming the new normal model of deployment, with 85% of businesses worldwide, self-identifying as being predominantly hybrid-cloud or multi-cloud today. India is home to more than 120 recognized ‘data centers’ and clouds. According to a recent IDC report, by 2023, 55% of India 500 organizations will have a multi-cloud management strategy that includes integrated tools across public and private clouds.[3] As India speeds up its mission to transform into a truly digital economy with the increasing inclusion of AI, Machine Learning (ML), data analytics, cloud and Internet of Things (IoT), cyberspace will become a complex domain. Related to this are the issues of cybersecurity and data privacy, which remain the top cloud concerns of IT decision makers. The persistent incidents in different industries relating to data leakage, ransomware, ATM/credit cards denial of service, diversion of network traffic intrusion in IT systems and networks using malware are on the rise. In 2020, cyber threats will increase rather than diminish, so businesses must ensure that 100% of their business-critical data can be recovered.

Here are some of the key technology trends that businesses will look to take advantage of and prepare for in the year ahead.

1.Container adoption will become more mainstream

In 2020, container adoption will lead to faster software production through more robust DevOps capabilities and Kubernetes will consolidate its status as the de facto container orchestration platform. The popularity of container adoption or ‘containerization’ is driven by two things: speed and ease. Containers are abstract data types that isolate an application from an operating system. With containers, microservices are packaged with their dependencies and configurations. This makes it faster and easier to develop, ship and deploy services. The trend towards multi cloud means businesses need data to be portable across various clouds — especially the major providers — AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. 451 Research projects the market size of application container technologies to reach $4.3 billion by 2022 and in 2020 more businesses will view containers as a fundamental part of their IT strategy[4].

2.Cloud Data Management will increase data mobility and portability

Businesses will look to Cloud Data Management to guarantee the availability of data across all storage environments in 2020. Data needs to be fluid in the hybrid and multi cloud landscape, and Cloud Data Management’s capacity to increase data mobility and portability is the reason it has become an industry in and of itself. The 2019 Veeam Cloud Data Management report revealed that organizations pledged to spend an average of $41 million on deploying Cloud Data Management technologies this year[5]. In India, the end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to total $3.4 billion in 2020, a 25% increase from 2019, according to Gartner[6]. To meet changing customer expectations, businesses are constantly looking for new methods of making data more portable within their organization. The vision of ‘your data, when you need it, where you need it’ can only be achieved through a robust CDM strategy, so its importance will only grow over the course of next year.

3. AI and analytics for business decision making

The future holds unlimited possibilities for data, AI, RPA and analytics. B2C businesses in financial, retail, manufacturing and healthcare sectors will increasingly prefer these engines of intuitive solutions than the traditional software. Every organization has information in its repositories based on historical data. This gives them a competitive advantage in seeing where improvements are needed and help predict market opportunities, potential gaps, and future trends in their space. Decision making capabilities can provide hidden insights to identify problems and help provide alternative ways of working. Large scale enterprises will use AI and analytics together to understand real-time insights into finance, sales, marketing, product development, and other processes. Data management will make companies more efficient and maximise their profits, helping them survive in the AI ecosystem in India.

4.Pay-as-you-go model to gain momentum

While cloud adoption will continue to gain momentum in India, the current economic condition is pushing customers towards more cloud-friendly consumption models instead of committing to CapEx purchases. Cloud computing will shift IT spending to a pay-as-you-go model, where you only pay for what you use, when you use it. When it comes to ROI, especially large enterprises will opt for Operational Expenses (OpEx) consumption models for their infrastructure, including software and hardware applicable for computing, network and storage to help increase profit margin and reap other benefits.

5.Backup success and speed gives way to restore success and speed

Data availability Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and expectations will rise in the next 12 months. Whereas the threshold for downtime, or any discontinuity of service, will continue to decrease. Consequently, the emphasis of the backup and recovery process has shifted towards the recovery stage. Backup used to be challenging, labor and cost-intensive. Faster networks, backup target devices, as well as improved data capture and automation capabilities have accelerated backup. According to our 2019 Cloud Data Management report, almost one-third (29%) of businesses now continuously back up and replicate high-priority applications[7]. The main concern for businesses now is that 100% of their data is recoverable and that a full recovery is possible within minutes. As well as providing peace of mind when it comes to maintaining data availability, a full complement of backed up data can be used for research, development and testing purposes. This leveraged data helps the business make the most informed decisions on digital transformation and business acceleration strategies.

6.Everything is becoming software-defined

Businesses will continue to pick and choose the storage technologies and hardware that work best for their organization, but data centre management will become even more about software. Manual provisioning of IT infrastructure is fast-becoming a thing of the past. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) will continue its proliferation into mainstream consciousness. Allowing business to create a blueprint of what infrastructure should do, then deploy it across all storage environments and locations, IaC reduces the time and cost of provisioning infrastructure across multiple sites. Software-defined approaches such as IaC and Cloud-Native — a strategy which natively utilizes services and infrastructure from cloud computing providers — are not all about cost though. Automating replication procedures and leveraging the public cloud offers precision, agility and scalability — enabling organizations to deploy applications with speed and ease. According to Gartner, Indian firms are estimated to spend the most in the SaaS segment. Representing 42 per cent of overall public cloud services spending in 2020, end-user spending on SaaS cloud application services in India is anticipated to increase by more than 21 per cent year-over-year, totaling to $1.4 billion in 2020.[8]

7.Organizations will replace, not refresh, when it comes to backup solutions

In 2020, the trend towards replacement of backup technologies over augmentation will gather pace. Businesses will prioritize simplicity, flexibility and reliability of their business continuity solutions as the need to accelerate technology deployments becomes even more critical. In 2019, organizations said they had experienced an average of five unplanned outages in the last 12 months[9]. Concerns over the ability of legacy vendors to guarantee data Availability are driving businesses towards total replacement of backup and recovery solutions rather than augmentation of additional backup solutions that will be used in conjunction with the legacy tool(s). The drivers away from patching and updating solutions to replacing them completely include maintenance costs, lack of virtualization and cloud capabilities, and shortcomings related to speed of data access and ease of management. Starting afresh gives businesses peace of mind that they have the right solution to meet user demands at all times.

8.All applications will become mission-critical

The number of applications that businesses classify as mission-critical will rise during 2020 — paving the way to a landscape in which every app is considered a high-priority. Previously, organizations have been prepared to distinguish between mission-critical apps and non-mission-critical apps. As businesses become completely reliant on their digital infrastructure, the ability to make this distinction becomes very difficult. On average, the 2019 Veeam Cloud Data Management report revealed that IT decision makers say their business can tolerate a maximum of two hours’ downtime of mission-critical apps[10]. But what apps can any enterprise realistically afford to have unavailable for this amount of time? Application downtime costs organizations a total of $20.1 million globally in lost revenue and productivity each year, with lost data from mission-critical apps costing an average of $102,450 per hour. The truth is that every app is critical.