By Rich Savastano, Senior Account Executive
Technology continues to moves at an incredibly rapid rate. What will be on the IT priority list for 2013? According to industry pundits and what we’re seeing out in the real world, here are some hot trends that we’re keeping a close eye on:
BYOD – The Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) phenomenon is here to stay with even the most highly-regulated industries embracing it. Organizations are trying to keep pace ensuring security, data protection, access to corporate applications and compliance. The first step is to build a mobile strategy that gives users the device freedom they want without sacrificing security or compliance. Having the capability to separate personal and corporate data, securing data at-rest and in-transit and finding the right mobile device management solution are all critical components of a strategic BYOD plan.
Cloud Data Protection and DR – The cloud can provide a secure and cost-effective resource for backup and archiving. So how should you incorporate cloud storage into your data protection plan? Key considerations include looking at the type of data you want to be stored in the cloud, conserving and optimizing bandwidth, and whether a public, private or hybrid approach will be best. In the end, the cloud can be an effective way to securely store data off-site for disaster recovery and improve RPOs and RTOs while lowering costs and freeing IT staff from tedious backup tasks.
Big Data – Unstructured information is the biggest contributor of data growth. Making sense of this data and extracting value is critical and traditional relational databases were not designed for decoding this type of information. Hadoop can handle the extreme volumes, but there are complexities. Organizations that take a proactive approach to managing big data and leverage the right data analytics will have a competitive advantage.
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) - Software-Defined Networking (SDN) - There is quite a bit of buzz surrounding SDN, especially since VMware’s $1.2 billion acquisition of Nicira. The goal of SDN (spearheaded by the Open Networking Foundation) is to bring the key characteristics of server virtualization to the network. The key concept of SDN is to decouple the network control plane from the network data plane, allowing for a “flat” network within a datacenter or between geographically disparate datacenters. This function allows for greater mobility of virtualized workloads throughout your enterprise, including the ability to move workloads to and from cloud environments without the necessity to change your IP scheme. SDN is being adopted at a rapid pace within IaaS public cloud providers and emerging in private cloud solutions as well. The last hurdle to truly mobile applications and fully utilized global resources has been the network, SDN has been developed to bring us into the era of mobility!
