In November 2019, Veeam published our 2020 Technology Predictions. We highlighted five key technology trends that we thought would be impactful and things to consider in the coming year. Overall, the predictions were fairly accurate, pointing to rising cloud adoption and increasing cyber threats. Let’s revisit the five technology predictions from last year.
1. Container adoption will become more mainstream.
What Veeam published
- “Kubernetes will consolidate its status as the de facto container orchestration platform.”
- “The popularity of container adoption or ‘containerization’ is driven by two things: speeds and ease.”
Looking back at the prediction
This seems accurate and what we experienced in the industry. Containers, while not fully mainstream, have moved beyond the nascent phase. Kubernetes certainly seems to have emerged as the industry’s primary container management platform. The global pandemic no doubt slowed down some businesses and their plans, but overall, the desire for speed of application development and ease of data movement do seem to have been key drivers for the usage of containers.
2. Data mobility and portability
What Veeam published
- “Data needs to be fluid in the hybrid and multi-cloud landscape, and (Cloud Data Management) CDM’s capacity to increase data mobility and portability is the reason it has become an industry in and of itself.”
- “Businesses are constantly looking for new methods of making data more portable within their organization.”
Looking back at the prediction
With some organizations going faster on their Digital Transformation efforts, and globally, the rise in massive work-from-home in 2020, the concept of data mobility and data portability did turn out to be important. Reducing the friction of data movement and facilitating cloud acceleration are among the benefits realized by Cloud Data Management. The vision of “your data, when you need it, where you need it” is one of the reasons for Veeam’s significant company growth in 2020.
3. Restore speed and success
What Veeam published
- “Data availability Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and expectations will rise in the next 12 months.”
- “Consequently, the emphasis of the backup and recovery process has shifted towards the recovery stage.”
Looking back at the prediction
This prediction is slightly hit and miss in its accuracy. We do have evidence from the Veeam Data Protection Report surveys that not only are service levels rising, but that more applications are becoming mission critical, and the service level expectation between high-priority and normal applications are shrinking, meaning non-critical workloads still cannot tolerate downtime. We have seen more organizations that are interested in the speed of access to data during recovery. However, sadly, our industry survey data shows that for the last two years, the number one driver for changing backup products and services was backup reliability (success rates) of backups. This means that backup remains challenging for many organizations, and the restore time expectations are decreasing as well.
4. Software-defined everything
What Veeam published
- “Businesses will continue to pick and choose the storage technologies and hardware which work best for their organization.”
- “Manual provisioning of IT infrastructure is fast-becoming a thing of the past. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) will continue its proliferation into mainstream consciousness.”
- “With over three-quarters (77%) of organizations using software-as-a-service (SaaS), a software-defined approach to data management is now relevant to the vast majority of businesses.”
Looking back at the prediction
This prediction seems mostly correct. The predominate deployment for backup solutions remains software, versus integrated appliances. Veeam is growing faster than any named vendor by multiple industry analysts, and we hear from new customers that a software-defined approach is preferred. However, the prediction that Infrastructure as Code (IaC) will make great strides, may have been too ambitious. IaC is arguably still taking hold, but the SaaS uptake and resulting heavy interest in software-defined solutions seems correct.
5. Replaceable backup solutions
What Veeam published
- “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.”
- “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).”
Looking back at the prediction
This prediction feels to have been largely correct. Points one and three about backup vendor replacement over augmentation seem validated. As mentioned above, Veeam grew market share, and Veeam has seen more organizations make complete changes in backup providers. The desire has long been in place to consolidate backup vendors, and this seems to be continuing. By the same rationale, it seems like simple, flexible and reliable backup solutions did generate more interest. It is unfortunate that a Veeam global industry survey shows that reliability, by way of backup success, is such a high issue.
Conclusion
Making predictions is always fun and interesting to do. It’s also fascinating to revisit and see if things turned out as expected. 2020 was certainly a very unexpected year with a series of challenges and changes thrown at the data center. Arguably, each of the predictions are still works in progress, but it’s great to see how far the data protection industry, and IT overall, have come in the last year.