Enterprise File Workload Switching To Cloud Data Management Platforms In 2021

2021 was a dynamic learning experience for all. The spectrum of changes that the pandemic brought to our work culture emphasized the importance of responsiveness, agility, and resilience. 2021 is going to be a year where the global workforce will fully adapt to the changes in the work environment. We predicted that the last year would witness a transition from data centers to edges and the cloud, and the prediction was right. Moreover, the pandemic has increased the pace of the change. When we look towards 2021, we expect that data management will remain a priority in the cloud with organizations on the lookout for ways to accelerate cloud data migrations and improve the efficiency of data management.

Intelligent Cloud Data Migrations

The number of cloud users has increased rapidly in the following years, especially when it comes to largely object-based cloud-native applications. With the adoption of the remote work culture, businesses are considering the cloud as their priority and all expansions and investments are moving to the cloud instead of adding to data center capacity. This implies that the previously file-based core enterprise workloads that ran in data centers are moving to the cloud. The market is responding to the changes.

IN 2020, several cloud and NAS vendors announced the launch of performant cloud file storage for the SMB as well as NFS. IN 2021, businesses will replace their older “lift and shift” cloud migration approach with intelligent cloud migration using data management and analytics. This facilitates the movement of the right data in the required time to the right cloud storage class. The optimization during migration will bring down the costs significantly during the process.

Compute Costs Are Being Overtaken By Cloud Storage Costs

From the records of the past three years, cloud cost optimization has been the key priority of businesses. Gartner has predicted that in 2020, at least 80 percent of the businesses will be outspending their cloud budgets. Considering the earlier relative cost-effectiveness of cloud object storage, a major portion of these costs has been in compute. However, this isn’t the case anymore because the cost of cloud file storage has become three times of S3 and the volume of file data is much larger than that of block data. All of this explains the importance of using cloud file storage. In 2021, enterprise IT organizations will adopt cloud data management solutions to understand the growth patterns of cloud data and efficiently manage its life cycle across multiple cloud and object storage options.

Data Center Replication Being Replaced By Cloud Center Replication

The cloud is not an inexpensive enterprise data storage option anymore. Enterprises have realized the importance of resiliency- spinning up the cloud access in case their data centers have become unavailable or as a protective measure against cyber attacks by having an air-gapped copy stored in the cloud. In 2021, many companies will discontinue the practice of mirroring their data across data centers and instead develop the practice of adding a second copy of their important data in the cloud. This cloud replication ensures that the data can be easily recovered in case a site goes down, the company faces a ransomware attack, or the users are looking to spin up some capacity in the cloud and want to access some of the cloud data.

Transitioning Of Cloud Storage Management From DevOps To Enterprise IT

Already, most companies are using two or more clouds and more companies will follow the path in 2021. With the cloud being the mainstream, there is a shift between the authorities managing cloud resources. As most cloud applications were cloud-native, their management operations were handled by the DevOps team. However, the core IT workloads are going to the cloud and it is the enterprise IT teams that are in charge of managing cloud storage. The trend is going to accelerate in 2021, increasing the demand for data management that allows a single interface for managing data across cloud storage and on-premises.

Data Management-As-A-Service Grows Important

Enterprise IT teams are bothered by the complexity of the tasks they are expected to manage and now they should also work across multiple storage and cloud vendors. Its flexibility and simplicity will increase the popularity of Data management-as-a-service. DMaaS solutions can automatically move data across storage classes, migrate heavy workloads and optimize costs, all with policy-based automation.  Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence will be employed more in DMaaS solutions to enhance their data-management capabilities driven by analytics and improve adaptability.

2021 will be a year of the new normal where cloud will attain the core position in enterprise IT strategies and multi-cloud data management will grow increasingly important. DMaaS that simplifies the tasks including data analytics and data migrations across multiple storage technologies and vendors will become prominent.