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Five trends stand out for 2019 in the way business and technology are connected, says Atish Gude, chief strategy officer (CSO) for US-based NetApp.
"Artificial intelligence (AI) is at the heart of trends in development, data management and delivery of applications and services at the edge, core and cloud," says Gude.
Also essential will be the increasing intelligence of Internet of Things (IoT) devices at the edge.
"Navigating the tempests of transformation are developers, whose requirements drive the creation of new paradigms and technologies that they must then master in pursuit of long-term competitive advantage," says Gude.
AI will get its early start mostly in the clouds
Still at an early stage of development, AI technologies will process massive amounts of data, the majority of which will happen in public clouds.
A rapidly growing body of AI software and service tools – mostly in the cloud – will make AI development easier and easier. This will enable AI applications to deliver high performance and scalability, both on and off premises, and support multiple data access protocols and varied new data formats.
IoT: Don't phone home. Figure it out
Edge devices will get smarter and more capable of making processing and application decisions in real time.
IoT devices and applications – with built-in services such as data analysis and data reduction – will get better, faster and smarter about deciding what data requires immediate action, what data gets sent home to the core or to the cloud, and even what data can be discarded.
Automagically, please
The demand for highly simplified IT services will drive continued abstraction of IT resources and the commoditisation of data services.
Decision makers will rely more and more on extremely robust yet "invisible" data services that deliver data when and where it's needed, wherever it lives.
Building for multi-cloud will be a choice
Hybrid, multi-cloud will be the default IT architecture for most larger organisations, while others will choose the simplicity and consistency of a single cloud provider.
Containers will make workloads extremely portable. But data itself can be far less portable than compute and application resources and that affects the portability of runtime environments.
Smaller organisations will either develop in-house capabilities as an alternative to cloud service providers, or they'll choose the simplicity, optimisation and hands-off management that come from buying into a single cloud provider.
On the other hand, larger organisations will demand the flexibility, neutrality and cost-effectiveness of being able to move applications between clouds.
The container promise: really cool new stuff
Container-based cloud orchestration will enable true hybrid cloud application development.
Containers promise, among other things, freedom from vendor lock-in.
New container-based cloud orchestration technologies will enable hybrid cloud application development, which means new applications will be developed for both public and on-premises use cases. No more porting applications back and forth.
This will make it easier and easier to move workloads to where data is being generated, rather than what has traditionally been the other way around.
