nScaled predictions for 2011

1. Organizations will stop throwing big money at big storage The cost per GB of cloud storage will fuel the growing realization that the days of making million $ investments into privately managed, top tier SAN storage are coming to an end.

2. Tiered storage, and smarter use of storage tiers will become a standard Organizations will take a harder look at the data residing on their expensive primary storage, and put solutions in place to manage its migration to appropriate media and locations. Factors for consideration will include access speeds, retrieval times and redundancy. Older, less accessed data will be moved to more cost effective storage tiers automatically. Primary, expensive storage will be viewed more as a ‘data cache’ – used only for current data. This will slow the needs for continued growth of primary, high performance SAN facilities.

3. Risks around cloud security will be pushed down the list of concerns Security will always remain an issue to be managed; however the benefits of using cloud services will overcome barriers to adoption around security concerns. High profile moves to the cloud from leading organizations will settle the nerves of followers that have been reluctant due to security.

4. Some real ROI studies will be published which show an irrefutable business case for infrastructure cloud services Most ROI studies to date have been either theoretical, or hard to quantify due to incomplete information. As organizations complete more significant migrations to the cloud, the ROI numbers will make the case very compelling which will make it hard to resist the move for slower adopters.

5. The hybrid cloud model will gain acceptance as the best fit for enterprise IT Organizations will significant existing IT assets and data will find most advantage in the hybrid cloud model (some on and some off-premise services). First to migrate will be disaster recovery services, followed by archive data and backup, then web facing services, and lastly primary applications.

6. Big software companies will start to become more cognizant of the threat from Amazon The clear leader in the public cloud space is Amazon Web Services. Their relentless drive to be the low cost option is matched by their innovation around proprietary platform services. This presents a growing threat to established enterprise software players that they have yet to wake up to (at least publicly)

7. Laws will be passed which are more supportive of the realities of cloud services Data privacy laws and regulations are not well suited to the rapidly evolving cloud services landscape. Virtual services which migrate automatically from one location to another, and free and open communication and data transport will cause corporations to lobby for revised legislation.

8. Backup processes will become smarter, tape will all but go away Disk to disk, offsite migration, low cost cloud storage, de-duplication, low cost bandwidth and frequent incremental data protection with no backup window are now a reality. The benefits to smarter backup are overwhelming, and many organizations are still paying more for less using outdated backup process and tape.

9. The playing field will level making smaller organizations better competitors from an IT perspective Globally distributed, sophisticated IT services have been the vocation of organizations with budgets and personnel to support them. On-demand cloud services with global availability are now a lost cost option, and knowledge workers from small and startup organizations can provide lean, focused competitive service offerings globally without the overhead.

10. Competitive differentiators will be more focused on the client experience As technical operations like backup, archive and high availability become better, cheaper and easier to manage, IT organizations will increasingly turn their attention to engineering competitive differentiation into their client facing technologies to improve the client experience. These developments will create client loyalty and become the new focus of the IT team.