As a Future Focused marketing agency we continually look to the future to anticipate and capitalise on potential trends rather than react to them. Equally importantly we apply the same methodology when working with our clients on their various projects. Clearly nobody can predict the future precisely, but we can look at current trends and extrapolate insights and observations from them, learn from previous experience and look for new innovative technologies that might break into market within the current time horizon.
So, let’s start by looking at the general landscape as we enter 2022. The pandemic is still with us and will be a factor throughout 2022 and beyond. Mercifully, vaccines have drastically reduced COVID deaths and serious illness for which we have amazing scientists and medics to thank, all enabled by IT(!) Alas, this does not mean that we can forget about COVID, far from it, we still need to adjust our way of life to minimise COVIDs impact to us and others. As well as using interventions such as wearing masks, washing hands, and practicing social distancing, the option of working from home is encouraged for those able to do so. As I mentioned in my blog Predicting the Unpredictable, businesses who had hastily put together remote work solutions such as VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) which had served well, now needed to be formalised and architected as long-term solutions. Similarly with staff continued remote working, IT infrastructure needs to be as simple as possible, making it easy to manage. Technologies such as HCI (Hyperconverged Infrastructure) are being increasingly deployed because they are easy to manage and scale well.
“We will see more hybrid cloud deployments in 2022”
Looking more generally at the IT landscape there is no denying the transformative and disruptive effect cloud computing is having, further accelerated by the pandemic conditions. Customers like the pay as you go (PAYG) payment schemes – if you use a little, you pay a little, if you use a lot, you pay a lot. Also appealing is clouds elasticity, the ability to scale up as needed and as important, the chance to scale down or completely ‘de-commission’ systems if need be.
The traditional IT suppliers have responded to this by making their offerings ‘cloud like’, providing PAYG, along with some elasticity. They provide hardware on-prem with all its security, performance, and data sovereignty benefits. Thereby combining the attractive characteristics of cloud and on-prem to deliver the best of both worlds in a hybrid cloud solution.
Interestingly, whilst the on-prem providers are embracing cloud like characteristics the cloud providers are moving in to the on-prem environment with the likes of AWS Outposts and Microsoft Azure Stack. So, all providers are heading towards a common goal – hybrid cloud. We will see more hybrid cloud deployments in 2022 giving customers the ability to better respond to whatever 2022 and beyond has in store for us.
Edge Computing
“Edge computing is forecast to grow at around 30% a year from now to 2026”
Whilst cloud computing is hosting an increasing number of workloads, cloud is not the best place for all workloads. There is a growing proliferation of geographically distributed intelligent devices, sensors and smart gadgets which produce vast quantities of data – the so called IoT (Internet of Things). Recent advances such as 5G are enabling new applications as well as being able to handle the throughput of data required. This data needs processing locally as often a very fast response is required, faster than can be accomplished via a round trip to a remote cloud data centre. Also, there is too much data to send it all back to the cloud, so analytics is performed locally with only the pertinent, summarised data sent back to the cloud. This is Edge computing and it is forecast to grow at around 30% a year from now to 2026. Edge requires local, often ruggedised, hardware, robust networking connecting back to on-prem or cloud data centres as well as an extensive software eco-system.
Agility
Agility is the watchword as we enter another year. Businesses need to be able to continue to adapt to the unpredictable world we live in. Agile IT systems are key, whether, based on-prem, in the cloud or at the edge.
All these advancing IT systems do a great job supporting businesses today but there is no denying they can appear complex to understand. Here at TBT Marketing, we make sense of the complex, supporting our clients to deliver their key messages in a simple and concise manner.
If you need ideas and strategies to take your solutions forward, then get in touch today call us on +44 (0)1373 469270 or email us at [email protected]