Dave Friend is the Co-Founder and CEO of Wasabi.
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What a year 2020 was. We faced everything from a historic (and seemingly never-ending) election to a global pandemic, and our personal and professional lives may be forever changed because of it.
As I write this from my home office, I reflect on the mass move to remote work that forced many organizations to go digital by necessity, thus accelerating digital transformation initiatives while simultaneously stressing IT infrastructures to new limits. The way we conducted business had to quickly evolve with the times, and as a result, we saw many organizations move to the cloud to address the need for enhanced access to data and increase collaboration and productivity amid a newly distributed workforce.
While much uncertainty remains in the year ahead, one thing I am certain of is the large role the cloud will continue to play in many industries. As the founder of a successful cloud backup software provider and leader of a cloud storage company, here are four areas I predict the cloud market will head in 2021:
Surveillance Will Be The Next Big Market To Move To The Cloud
I see the surveillance industry being the next big industry to move to the cloud. Surveillance is one of the world's biggest consumers of storage, with over 770 million surveillance cameras in operation around the world today. Cameras also increase in resolution every year.
Until now, surveillance has faced challenges around cost and bandwidth that have prevented the industry from moving to the cloud. Migrating their storage from on-premises to any of the hyperscalers like Amazon, Microsoft or Google would actually increase costs. But as more low-cost cloud storage competitors enter the market, more viable options will become available.
When it comes to bandwidth, surveillance typically doesn’t produce a steady stream of data all day long — they have both active and inactive periods. As more hybrid cloud options become available, surveillance organizations can leverage the ability to have a few days of data saved locally and streamed to the cloud to reduce the need for considerably high-priced networks.
Increased Diversification
As we head further into the new year, we will likely see a richer, more diverse cloud technology market. The business landscape is currently being driven by the need to manage rapidly increasing amounts of data at organizations of all different shapes and sizes. In fact, IDC predicted that the amount of data stored was on track to hit 59 zettabytes in 2020 alone.
So, while 2021 will continue to be a good year for hyperscalers, more organizations may be turned off by their associated high costs, including hidden egress and ingress fees, rigid capacity and vendor lock-in. It’s important to remember that hyperscalers take an “everything under one roof” approach — but you can’t be the best at everything.
As a result, I believe the cloud industry will continue to expand, with new storage providers offering increasingly diverse IT service packages that are more flexible, cost-effective and personalized. This will enable a greater shift to hybrid or multicloud storage options throughout the enterprise. The channel will also play more of a role in this as partners continue to come together to offer robust and niche IT services.
MSPs, VARs And CSPs Thrive, And Developers Become Cloud Experts
As a result of the diversification of cloud services in 2021, managed service providers (MSPs) and system integrators will thrive as their skills will be in demand to piece together complete solutions from an array of best-of-breed providers.
We may also see the developer role evolve as tech stacks shift toward a more cloud-native approach. With traditional on-premises solutions, developers' main concerns centered around selecting the right hardware for their applications.
While this will still be the case for the foreseeable future, when it comes to the cloud, there is a skills gap. Developers will need to become experts on the increasing number of cloud providers, what each has to offer and which are the best fit for their organization’s needs. They will also need to be sufficient in configuring hybrid solutions where different functions are performed in different clouds, if they aren’t already. This will ultimately expand developer capabilities and help make their jobs easier.
Data As A Competitive Advantage
Over the past 15 years or so, the focus has evolved from moving workloads and production applications to the cloud to the data being stored in the cloud and the value it can unleash.
In 2021 and beyond, we’ll be entering the “Data Age” of the cloud as organizations increasingly depend on and leverage the large amount of historical data they have accrued. And the volume of this historical data will increase exponentially as the next three years of data creation and consumption is predicted to exceed that of the previous 30 years combined.
The growing “abundance mindset” — the more data stored and saved for future use, the better — will be a contributing factor to this, as will decreasing storage prices. Many successful companies form their entire business around the accumulation, analysis and sale of large quantities of historical data. Organizations will continue to build data lakes of enormous sizes, which will enable new levels of innovation and the deployment of new capabilities like machine learning, speech recognition, facial recognition, surveillance and AI applications that all demand massive amounts of data.
It is clear to me that 2020 acted as the catalyst for businesses to fully embrace the cloud, and I don’t see that stopping in 2021. We’ve entered uncharted territory when it comes to cloud technology, and I’m excited to see what innovations will come next in this booming industry.
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