Netapp Predictions 2022

Attributed to: Matthew Hurford, VP, Solutions Engineering & Field CTO, Asia Paci c, NetApp.

The evolution of technology is constant, driving organisations to continually invest in digital transformation initiatives. Where will the technology evolution lead in 2022? Below are the top technology trends and predictions by NetApp that will gain momentum in 2022 and beyond as the digital transformation accelerates.

“DIGITAL FIRST” AS NEW BUSINESS PARADIGM

“While IT teams and IT leaders are historically called on to drive digitisation and increase value, the roles will be reversed in the postpandemic world. At NetApp, we believe that Digital Transformation will continue to drive strategic decision-making as more enterprises gain a keener insight into its own operational rhythms and data fabric from any of its o ce across the globe. We see this, for example, in business analytics, where the analysis of user experience journeys become a crucial information source for realtime strategic decisions. We believe that the increasing convergence between digital and analog worlds will result in ‘digital-twin’ concepts being more widely adopted among enterprise. By harnessing this ‘digital- rst’ paradigm, enterprises will be able to truly embrace agile developments, test processes and respond to feedback virtually, even before concepts are being considered for rollout on a larger scale.”

CYBERSECURITY AND RESILIENCY

“The pandemic has forced a hybrid workforce, and the past two years have triggered a rapid increase in ransomware attacks as with millions of endpoints connecting to the networks, opening up a multitude of new infection vectors. Companies are facing more threats to their data and ultimately their business than ever before. Accenture’s State of Cybersecurity Resilience 2021 report found that there were on average

270 attacks per company over this year, a 31 percent increase from 2020. Additionally, 81 percent of chief information security o cers (CISOs) said that “staying ahead of attackers is a constant battle...”

“Against the backdrop of these risks, we believe that enterprises will have to come to terms with the fact that it will be virtually impossible to cut o all threats of infection routes. For these reasons, NetApp recently announced ONTAP, the world’s rst enterprise storage and data management platform to achieve Commercial Solutions for Classi ed (CSfC) validation for a data-at-rest capability package. With this, organisations across the globe can bene t from robust security capabilities to protect customers’ information on-premises and in remote locations from foreign actors, ransomware attacks or other data loss threats they may face.”

SUSTAINED IMPACT OF THE PANDEMIC AND CLOUD ACCELERATION

“The global supply chain has been brought close to its breaking point by the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on air, sea, and land travel. We predict that cloud adoption will accelerate faster as the supply chain constraints drive buyers to nd alternatives to purchasing traditional on-premises infrastructure to meet demands. At the same time, optimisation of production lines and business processes can help the system to become more robust in the future. Marrying IT and Operational Technology (OT), for example through digital twin concepts and technology such as IIoT and analytics, has virtually limitless potential.

“A recent 2021 NetApp Hybrid Cloud Enterprise Customer Adoption Survey revealed that this rate of acceleration will become even more rapid. 77 percent of executives interviewed globally plan to operate

“2022 will usher a new era where AI will become ‘productised’, in three ways.

“First, managed services will become a primary delivery mode for AI as communications service providers (CSPs) double down on “Graphic Processing Unit (GPU)as-a-Service” type o erings. This is an important facilitator. A recent report suggested that Singapore’s reputation as a regional technology hub is being threatened by a widening tech skills gap, with a top-ranking central bank authority calling for more foreign immigration to address the crunch. As more industries use AI to remain competitive and innovate, there needs to be a solid technological foundation that can scale accordingly. Organisations need to move their AI projects from siloed infrastructure onto shared, virtualised, production environments, and managed IT services providers will o er critical

their businesses in hybrid cloud environments for the foreseeable future to meet growing business demands for faster innovation, while optimising operations and lowering infrastructure costs.

“A second driver of cloud acceleration revolves around the major change cycles that are experienced by workforces across Asia Paci c which have been triggered and sustained by the pandemic. Hybrid working environments are the expectation of employees moving forward. The ability to work anywhere will increase the digital capabilities businesses must provide to their sta . Controversially, the pandemic also shone the light on labour shortages surfacing quickly and unexpectedly. This will be both a challenge and opportunity for high-skill sectors like the IT industry. On one hand, there is bound to be erce competition for skilled personnel; on the other hand, IT itself can deliver technologies that remedy the labour gap, such as low code, no code and AI software development.

“Finally, the constant simpli cation of public services access and the services in general will drive broad buy in for digitisation. People are also going to be more comfortable with providing their data because they have experienced the positive impact of virtualised service delivery.”

PRODUCTISED AI

“Arti cial intelligence (AI) has been transformative in industries with access to huge datasets and trained algorithms to analyse and interpret them. In 2022, we will see AI permeate more industries, including agriculture, food production, fastfood chains, and the entertainment and hospitality sector. Agriculture and the food industry, for example, will tap on AI for packing and processing, while other sectors gain most from general automation and the simpli cation of processes.

“We predict that cloud adoption will accelerate faster as the supply chain constraints drive buyers to nd alternatives to purchasing traditional on-premises infrastructure to meet demands.”

expertise to support strategic digital transformation initiatives, ensuring their customer’s IT strategies are cutting edge and remain highly scalable.

“Next, tiny machine learning (tinyML) – the intersection of machine learning and embedded internet of things (IoT) devices. Over the past decade, we have witnessed the size of machine learning algorithms grow exponentially due to improvements in processor speeds and the advent of big data. Experts are forecasting a massive increase in AI at the edge, down to very low cost, extremely resource constrained edge devices. Think sensors rather than compute devices. This is another generation of devices that feed the ever-growing edge-core-cloud data pipeline, which industries need to access and leverage to di erentiate themselves.

“And, nally, the macro perspective on AI and ML becomes clearer. Countries and governments are guaranteed to invest in AI and ML capabilities to accelerate economic transformation and compete on a global basis. AI provides gamechanging solutions to enable organisations to emerge from the pandemic in a strong position. Gartner predicts that by 2025, the 10% of enterprises that establish AI engineering best practices will generate at least three times more value from their AI e orts than the 90% of enterprises that do not.”

As more organisations increase their use of AI, they may face many challenges, including workload scalability and data availability. NetApp believes that one key success factor to address these challenges is the seamless replicating of data across sites and regions to create a cohesive and uni ed AI data pipeline by bringing together data management capabilities with popular open-source tools and frameworks.

DATA TRENDS

“The value of data has never been clearer. However, more often than not, it remains siloed within applications, which means that it’s not being used as e ectively as possible. At NetApp, we have been advocating a data fabric as a strategic approach to the enterprise storage operations, and Gartner predicts that by 2024, data fabric deployments will quadruple e ciency in data utilisation while cutting down human-driven data management tasks in half.

“As technology continues to drive change and innovation, we are seeing the development of several technology sub-trends. First, analytics and optimisation of digital services. As automation and smarter applications take control, FinOps results are much easier to come by. This results in an increased return on investment (ROI) from cloud investments throughout the public and private sectors.

“Second, production environments. We are seeing a clear move away from legacy applications towards containerised solutions and microservices to streamline work ows and deliver services. Third, speci cally in data storage, Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Network (SAN) will continue to be the technologies of choice to underpin digital innovation. Writeable storage media can also still be made more e cient.”

QUANTUM COMPUTING

“As technology steadily increase, quantum computing is expected to re-accelerate the performance cycle postulated by Moore’s law. In early 2021, China established the world’s rst integrated quantum communication network, and in October, launched the world’s fastest programmable quantum computers. While there has been increased talks on quantum computing, early use cases are expected to be delivered as a service but will not come into fruition for some time. In reality, quantum computing remains uneconomic for solving real-world problems. But we are hopeful that the manufacturers in the di erent branches of IT – from security providers to hyperscalers, storage companies, to GSIs/global advisors – will o er greater clarity into their quantum computing strategy in 2022. We believe that these manufacturers will also theorise how they can deliver quantum computing innovation as a service for their customers and overcome branch-speci c limitations, like building a data pipeline into the quantum computing cloud.”

SUSTAINABILITY

“Green topics are on the rise – as demonstrated by the 2021 Climate Change Conference. Asia Paci c’s environmental, social and governance (ESG) assets under management (AUM) hit US$93 billion in Q3, with over 500 sustainability funds domiciled in the region and about 120 new funds launched in 2021.

“NetApp has long been a leader in sustainability and began tackling the recon guration of its data centers to operate on green IT principles back in 2007. In our report ‘Breaking down the Glass House’ – released over ve years ago – we explained how data storage providers could blaze a new path in building greener data centers that employ features and design to promote sustainability in terms of energy use and the physical space the center occupies, while maintaining or even increasing current e ciency.

“Today, our climate risks have become a climate emergency. There is no better time than now to review what all of us can do in Tech to revisit these paths to delivering data-driven green innovation.”