A hot topic of conversation across boardrooms far and wide is what’s on the horizon for 2022 in the technology space. Patrick Smith, CTO EMEA, Pure Storage, pulls back the curtain on the next 12 months and forecasts three core developments for which every CIO should prepare.
Pure Storage has unveiled its technology predictions for 2022, featuring suggestions that cloud and the rise of containerisation take prominent positions on the priority lists of regional CIOs.
“The past two years have been about survival and tentative exploration,” said Patrick Smith, CTO EMEA, Pure Storage. “The need to accommodate remote work drove regional businesses to the cloud in unheard-of volumes. But the requirement for Business Continuity was soon followed by the evaluation of other technologies that would allow greater innovation both during the crisis and as/when it passes. Now that enterprises realise that operations are still ongoing, we expect to see innovation resume with greater confidence than ever, and it is within the context of that tentative optimism that we make our 2022 predictions.”
The internal politics of the dominant cloud
While cloud computing has proven itself an effective springboard for innovation, a rift will emerge in organisations between realists and idealists.
“Amid the economic recovery, the attraction of the cloud is clear — it is a great place to stage proofs of concept safely and cheaply and become an early adopter,” said Smith. “But it is also a source of friction within organisations as the keen adopters and the cloud realists butt heads.”
These tensions will increase throughout 2022 as the CIO and CEO rush to move everything to the cloud in an attempt to avoid being left behind. Those with a more balanced view on the cloud will find themselves at odds with the ‘move everything to the cloud’ mentality of the CIO and CEO. Cloud realists – who tend to be those lower down the food chain – risk being labelled non-believers and may be marginalised if they do not conform to the cloud enthusiasts’ way of thinking.
Kubernetes will live on, despite the rise of low-code and no-code
As ‘the driving force’ behind the sweeping changes seen in the way organisations build and run applications, the popularity of Kubernetes and containers will continue to rise heading into 2022, despite the parallel uptick in popularity of low-code and no-code development.
Speaking on the value of Kubernetes and containers, Smith said: “Organisations expect the impossible from their data — they want faster insights on bigger datasets for a lower cost. The temptation is to think that no-code cloud-based solutions can provide the answers, but this underestimates Kubernetes and container technology.”
Supporting this, 2022 will be a time for growth in the number of startups in the K8s ecosystem, with emerging businesses offering particular focus on the areas of security and stack observability. However, a major challenge for organisations that are keen to embrace Kubernetes will continue to be the prevailing skills gap across the region.
CIOs that fail to unite container and cloud strategies will find themselves on thin ice
“If you’re a CIO and you can’t answer the question: ‘When are we going to the cloud?’, the likelihood is that you’ll be fired,” Smith said. “The scale of adoption of cloud technology has been astronomical over the past few years but will increasingly focus on exploiting the benefits of adopting containers in 2022.”
The widespread reallocation of IT budgets from the maintenance of systems — which is now largely undertaken, at least in part, by cloud service providers — to the pursuit of innovation means CIOs must formulate roadmaps for how they can bring containers and the cloud together in 2022 to promote agility and scalability.
However, Smith has a final warning for those CIOs: “They need to remember that fast adoption isn’t everything; the foundations need to be solid. Plans need to be forward-looking and build in flexibility because change in this space is guaranteed — be it cloud provider or K8s distribution or both. Modern applications run on modern data services where K8s is the foundation; enterprises want to win with data and the CIO holds the key to this victory.”
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