Adapt: Looking Ahead to 2021

The pandemic has accelerated digital transformation priorities to mobilize workforces, facilitate collaboration, and ensure business continuity. In combatting the new challenges that accompany new priorities, IT departments across the globe are continuing their search for the right solutions.

According to the 2021 Gartner Board of Directors Survey, 69 percent of corporate directors want to accelerate enterprise digital strategies and implementations to help deal with the ongoing disruption from the pandemic. In our own recent Cloud Impact Study, respondents highlight cloud computing as an essential component in minimizing disruption. The study also finds that 99 percent of respondents acknowledge the cloud as essential to overall organizational success, and 89 percent characterize it as necessary for business continuity.

At Aptum, as we take stock of the events of this year and how cloud computing has helped organizations adapt, based on our customers, partners, and our own experiences, we anticipate that the following predictions will become a reality in 2021.

DRaaS adoption will be driven by the need for business resilience

Bandwidth and latency issues created by surges in traffic are no longer a periphery concern for CIOs. Application outages such as the recent ones from Google (Docs and Gmail), Microsoft Outlook and MS Teams have put these problems firmly on the map. With entire workforces becoming remote all over the world, it is essential to ensure the same standards of business continuity exist for employees while they are away from the corporate facilities.

While most organizations have a disaster recovery plan in place for data protection, data retention, and fast deployments, many have only recently undergone their first test. Several months after the trial-by-fire, businesses can now readjust and confront the gaps in their business continuity and disaster recovery (DR) plans. As a result, companies will consider end-to-end solutions and adopt disaster recovery as a service to future-proof access to data.

Robust and flexible DR is a fundamental cornerstone of business assurance. Typically, DR strategies utilize distributed cloud resources to create new platforms that support business applications, so organizations aren’t entirely reliant upon one platform. Aptum’s service (DRaaS) goes a step further, replicating and hosting virtual servers in the cloud to provide failover in the case of any incidents occurring, ensuring full protection of data.

Demand for multi-cloud and hybrid infrastructure will grow

Many organizations are reassessing where they are hosting certain workloads to optimize IT budgets and increase business agility and resilience. As a result, more than half will embrace a hybrid approach to their cloud infrastructure for greater agility. Aptum’s recent study shows that more than half (59 percent) of organizations plan to decrease their on-premise infrastructure in the next 18-24 months. The same percentage of companies expect to put more infrastructure into the public cloud, while an even higher proportion (66 percent) plan to expand their private cloud workloads.

In 2021, businesses will seek assistance in determining the right infrastructure, where applications and workloads would be best suited, and what tools should be adopted to optimize those environments. At Aptum, our range of network services ensures data and applications can interact across environments with high performance and security requirements. We are proud to be a Cloud Agnostic Service Provider, where we focus on making sure our clients’ data is in the right place with proper protection and connection.

Cloud Management Platforms will become a necessity to enable agility

As a result of the complexities that may arise from hybrid-cloud or multi-cloud adoption and ongoing economic restraints due to the pandemic, insights into the effectiveness of workloads in different cloud environments will become essential. Subsequently, the demand for Cloud Management Platforms is expected to surge in popularity. Investing in a comprehensive Cloud Management Platform gives businesses visibility and access to real-time information on the cost and performance of all cloud services across multiple ecosystems to enable greater agility.

Agility is crucial for companies to continue to deliver uninterrupted service to customers while visibility is key for security. If one of those resources is misconfigured or deployed with sensitive information and left unmanaged, security and compliance can be exceedingly difficult to achieve for IT staff. As cybercriminals move to take advantage of hybrid and multi-cloud users’ blind spots, knowing the location of all crucial data and having controls in place to protect that data is critical.

We have seen the demand for agility and visibility both in the market and amongst our customers increase significantly over the last 12 months. Earlier this year, we launched our Hybrid Cloud Manager to help improve the cloud experience by removing complexity and giving customers real-time visibility into cloud resources and configurations.

Businesses will harness Data As Infrastructure™

Data As Infrastructure™ is the concept that data is at the foundation of every organization and is as important as physical infrastructure. As organizations seek deeper insights to enable business resiliency, efficiency, and continuity, the value in approaching Data As Infrastructure™ on both a conceptual and practical level will increase.

Research from McKinsey confirms the benefit of this methodology. Data-driven companies are 23 times more likely to acquire a customer, 6 times more likely to retain that customer, and 19 times more likely to be profitable as a result. This approach will lead companies toward a cloud solution tailored to their data needs and encourage them to take extra steps to optimize data usage.

As companies face the exponential growth of data, the choice of technology infrastructure is critical to harness its power and unlock the potential of data to maximize business outcomes and technology investments.

Data is vital to decision making, profitability, productivity, and impacts many other drivers for business success. Focusing on these drivers when formulating a cloud computing strategy will give companies a platform to build upon to achieve their desired outcomes.

Moving into 2021

As the world continues an expedited digital transformation journey, there lies limitless opportunity for the IT industry. We must continue to innovate and provide total solutions and tailored options to support companies as they adapt, evolve, and look ahead to 2021 and beyond.