We all went into 2020 with a plan. Those plans were rendered irrelevant just a few months into the year. Organizations quickly rolled out contingency plans and put non-essential initiatives on hold. This may lead one to believe that 2020 was a wash for technology innovation. I would argue otherwise. In fact, organizations deployed inspired solutions to tackle considerable challenges.

Here are a few observations from 2020 and five enterprise tech predictions for 2021.

The Edge Is the New Frontier for Innovation

Amazing things are happening at the edge. We saw that on full display in 2020. Here are a few examples:

• When the pandemic first hit, a lab testing company rolled out 400 mobile testing stations across the United States in a matter of weeks.
• A retailer relocated their entire primary distribution center, which was in a state under stay-at-home orders, to fulfill an influx of e-commerce orders from a new location.

These organizations used existing edge investments to react and innovate with velocity. And in the year ahead, we will continue to see prioritized investment at the edge.

Network reliability and performance directly impacts employee and customer experience. That alone led to expansive SD-WAN rollouts at the edge and in-home offices. Simple SaaS-delivered solutions (inclusive of hardware) will further improve security and user experience wherever employees choose to work. And this will start a trend in which these solutions become the norm.

Additionally, I expect organizations to increasingly adopt a secure access service edge (SASE) solutions. Legacy network and security architectures create unnecessary hair pinning and performance degradation. Instead, our future will lie in application and infrastructure services that are defined in software and deployed and managed as software updates. While upending legacy procurement processes along the way, organizations will dramatically improve performance and security.

We are also getting far more intelligent at the edge, with the ability to learn, react and optimize in real-time. Furthermore, we are seeing new opportunities for infrastructure consolidation at the edge, reducing the number of specialized appliances required to meet technology needs. This is an exciting development as it opens doors for cost-positive solutions where you improve automation, safety, and efficiencies, while simultaneously reducing costs.

Decentralization of Machine Learning

Staying at the edge for another moment, let’s talk about federated machine learning (FML). We are starting to see early uptake in this area among businesses. Across all industries, organizations are innovating to make better data-driven decisions, while leveraging highly distributed technology footprints.

With compute capacity practically everywhere, federated learning allows organizations to train ML models using local data sets. Open source projects, such as FATE and Kubeflow, are gaining traction. I expect the emergence of intuitive applications on these platforms to further accelerate adoption.

Early ML solutions disproportionately benefited a small percentage of enterprises. These organizations had mature data science practices already in place. ML adoption continues to pick up pace. And that acceleration is driven by turnkey solutions built for “everyone else.” These are enterprises that want to reap the rewards of ML without having to make large investments in data science teams—often a difficult challenge given the industry shortage of data scientists today.

Renewed Momentum for Workplace 2.0 Initiatives

The pandemic brought renewed momentum for many Workplace 2.0 initiatives. I’m especially interested in augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) use cases.

AR and VR are gaining traction, especially in use cases like employee training, AR-assisted navigation (such as on corporate campuses), and in online meetings. This year, I had the opportunity to participate in a VR meeting. The cognitive experience was quite fascinating. While on a Zoom meeting, it’s quite obvious that you’re on a video call. But after a few minutes in a VR meeting, you start to feel like you are actually in the room together.

There’s still work to be done to drive mainstream adoption. 2021 will see gains in the adoption of AR and VR, aided by advancements in enterprise-class technologies that address security, user experience, and device management of these solutions.

That said, the biggest gap for VR, in my opinion, is that there is not an equivalent to Microsoft PowerPoint for VR. In other words, in the future, I want to be able to quickly create 3D content that can be consumed in a VR paradigm. Today, there simply is not an easy productivity tool that would allow anyone to quickly create rich 3D content that takes full advantage of the 360-degree panorama afforded by VR. I expect this to be an area of focus for AR and VR technologists moving forward.

Continued Evolution of Intrinsic Security and Data Protection

Innovations in the security space brought intrinsic security from what some called a marketing buzzword into something real.

For instance, today one can leverage virtualization technologies to secure a workload at the moment it is powered on, prior to even an operating system being installed. That is intrinsic security by definition and represents a major step forward from the traditional security model.

In 2021, security will once again be amongst the top technology investments for the year, with both ransomware and security at the edge getting increased attention. Sophisticated ransomware attacks are not just targeting data, but also data and system backups. This creates the potential that even system restores are compromised.

We need to change how we protect systems and data. We need to fundamentally rethink what it means to back up and recover systems. Legacy solutions with static protection and recovery approaches will start facing the potential for disruption as the year progresses.

When we look at the edge, a growing number of technology decisions are being made by the lines of business—sometimes even at a local level—and not central IT. This has long created challenges as smart and connected devices are deployed at edge sites faster than traditional IT processes. While we should always strive toward deploying compliant solutions, we need to accept the fact that business velocity and agility requirements can be in conflict.

To that end, we must look at technologies that offer broader discovery of connected systems at the edge and provide adaptive security policy enforcement for those systems. Instead of fighting the battle for control, security leaders must accept there is some degree of chaos and innovate with the expectation of chaos as opposed to outright control.

Applying New Technologies to Old Challenges

In 2021, what’s old may be new again—at least in taking another look at how new technologies can help solve old challenges.

For example, in the area of sustainable computing, there is a lot of energy efficiency to be gained in the traditional data center. VMware currently has an xLabs project to help our customers optimize hot and cool aisle spaces in their data centers. Early studies revealed a promising amount of energy efficiency can be gained through platform-driven data center heat management.

Additionally, machine learning may soon help improve accessibility. Earlier this month, we announced a project spearheaded by VMware technologists to help developers conduct better automated accessibility testing with machine learning. This project will make it easier for organizations to meet accessibility standards, while reducing costs for the software they build.

2020 was a year of determining progress. Unforeseen challenges taught us to plan and architect for the expectation of change. And we must be resilient to adapt to new ways of living and working.

2021 ushers in hope as we navigate whatever our new normal will be. And I’m excited to see how that new normal will be shaped by advancements in technology.

Author: Chris Wolf, VP, Advanced Technology Group, VMware

Source: https://www.vmware.com/radius/5-enterprise-tech-predictions-2021/

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Multi-cloud is top of mind for many technology leaders. What are the benefits? The challenges? And ultimately, is it a right fit for the business and its teams? There’s no consensus about multi-cloud—as evidenced in a recent Twitter thread I started. So, let’s break down why. I’ll share my view of multi-cloud and possible approaches to cloud strategy implementation without (yet) getting into how VMware speeds your cloud journey. Then, let’s hear about yours. There are lots to cover about strategy, so I’ll start with definitions.

What is Multi-Cloud?

One of the biggest challenges that surfaced in the discussion of multi-cloud is that we all have slightly different definitions of multi-cloud.

First, as a starting point, a commonly agreed-upon definition of hybrid cloud:

Hybrid cloud: consistent infrastructure and operations between on-premises virtualization infrastructure/private clouds and public cloud.

Hybrid cloud is about connecting on-premises environments and public cloud.  The key distinguishing characteristic of a hybrid cloud is that the infrastructure (and thus operations) is consistent between on-prem and cloud. This means the same operational tools and skillsets can be used in both locations and that applications can easily be moved between locations as no modifications are needed.

Now to define multi-cloud:

Multi-cloud: running applications on more than one public cloud.

This definition could mean a single application/app that is stretched across clouds but more often means multiple apps on multiple clouds (but each app is contained entirely on a single cloud). It could mean that the underlying cloud is partially or completely abstracted away, or it could mean that the full set of cloud capabilities is available to the apps.  Perhaps confusingly, multi-cloud can include on-premises clouds too!  This is just a generalization of the “many apps in many locations” definition.

Multi-Cloud Approaches

Having apps running on multiple clouds presents challenges: How do you manage all these apps, given the vastly different tooling and operational specifics across clouds? How do you select which cloud to use for which apps? How do you move apps between clouds? How much of this do you want to expose to your developers?

There are a variety of approaches to multi-cloud that offer different trade-offs to the above problems.  I see four primary approaches businesses are taking to multi-cloud:

• No Consistency: This is the default when a business goes multi-cloud. Each cloud has its own infrastructure, app services (e.g., database, messaging, and AI/ML services), and operational tools.  There is little to no consistency between them and the business does nothing to try and drive consistency.  Developers must build apps specifically for the cloud they’re using.  Businesses will likely need separate operations teams and tooling for each cloud.  But apps can take full advantage of all the cloud’s capabilities.
• Consistent Operations: The business aligns on consistent operations and tooling (e.g., governance, automation, deployment and lifecycle management, monitoring, backup) across all clouds, each with its unique infrastructure and app services.  Developers still build apps to the specifics of the cloud and moving apps between clouds is still a large amount of work, but the business can standardize on an operational model and tooling across clouds.  This can reduce the cost of supporting multiple clouds through consolidated operations teams with less tooling and increase app availability through common, well-tested, and mature operational practices.

• Consistent Infrastructure: The business leverages a consistent infrastructure abstraction layer on top of the cloud.  Kubernetes is a common choice here, where businesses direct their developers to use clouds’ Kubernetes services.  VMware Cloud is another option, as it’s the consistent VMware SDDC across all clouds.  Common infrastructure standardizes many parts of the app, allowing greater portability across clouds while still leveraging the common operational model (which is now more powerful as the infrastructure has been made consistent!).  Developers can still take advantage of each cloud’s app services though, which is where some cloud stickiness can creep in.
• Consistent Applications: The business directs its developers to use consistent infrastructure abstraction and non-cloud-based app services for their apps.  This builds on Consistent Infrastructure by also specifying that any app services used must not come directly from the cloud provider.  Instead, app services can be delivered by ISVs (e.g., MongoDB, Confluent Kafka) as Kubernetes operators or as a SaaS offering (e.g., MongoDB Atlas, Confluent Cloud).  Apps are now easily portable across clouds and cloud selection is totally predicated on cost, security, compliance, performance, and other non-functional considerations.

It’s important to note that no approach is generally “better” than any of the others.  Each approach comes with tradeoffs and it’s up to the business to decide which is best for it based on its unique needs and requirements.  And in some cases, businesses may leverage more than one approach, with different apps or development teams taking different approaches.

Strategy or Inevitable Outcome?

The natural next question is whether you should go multi-cloud.  In an ideal world, running all your apps on a single cloud is likely best for most businesses.  You can standardize everything you’re doing to that one cloud, simplifying app implementation and operations.  Apps can take advantage of all the specific innovative features of that cloud.  You can negotiate higher discounts with the cloud provider because you have higher usage than you would if you spread your workloads over many different clouds.

The problem, though, is that it’s very hard to run all apps in only one cloud.  Acquisitions may be using a different cloud.  After the acquisition closes, the question is then whether to move all the apps onto a single cloud (likely using precious time and resources that could be invested in integrating that acquisition) or living with multi-cloud.  Shadow IT is still happening in many businesses, where developers or lines of business make independent decisions to use another cloud technology, meaning you’ll likely end up in a multi-cloud situation even if you try to avoid it.  Finally, even if you can deal with those problems, what if your preferred cloud isn’t innovating in a new area as fast as another cloud?  It may be necessary for the business to start using that other cloud, putting you into a multi-cloud world.

The general takeaway is, try as hard as you might, being a single cloud likely won’t be the case for very long.  Something will happen to make you go multi-cloud.  Really, it’s just a question of whether it’s due to a proactive strategy or an inevitable outcome because of one or more of the above reasons.  In either case, having a multi-cloud plan is a must!

Author: Kit Colbert, VP & CTO, Cloud Platform BU at VMware

Source: https://octo.vmware.com/multi-cloud-strategy-or-inevitable-outcome-or-both

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A summary of the top enterprise trends to look forward to in 2021.

With the start of a new year, we can say goodbye to the tumultuous and challenging 2020 – a year that brought about monumental changes in our industry through acquisitions, technology introductions, and of course, a shift to remote work force. No one could have predicted all the changes that happened last year, but now we have an opportunity to look back on how the server trends and technologies detailed by us last year impacted our industry. And as we have done for the past several years, we want to continue our tradition in Dell’s Infrastructure CTO group of highlighting some of the most interesting technology and industry trends we expect to see impacting our server incubation and product efforts this year. These trends were compiled by polling our senior technologists in the server organization, who are looking at the most impactful influences to their workstreams.

When the technologists provided their inputs, the underlying theme that emerged was the desire to life cycle data – curate, transport, analyze and preserve data – in the most effective and secure means, while producing the most efficient business outcomes from the infrastructure. Since the generation of data has continued to increase, customers are looking for ways to leverage third-party services in an integrated offering to allow them to understand how to more quickly analyze and value the right data in the most cost-effective and secure manner. This paradigm has also forced owners of the IT equipment that performs these analyses to ensure they are using the most effective technology integrations. These integrations need to be managed with the minimal amount of operational expenses across a continuum of Edge, Core and Cloud architectures. Finally, 2020 created another challenge to carry forward, which is the ability to adopt new technologies with more remote staff and remote users stressing the infrastructure in means and methods not expected this early in most digital transformation plans.

So, with that introduction, let us provide you the Top Trends for 2021 that are influencing our server technology efforts and product offerings:

• aaS becomes the Enterprise theme. As technology velocity continues to rise, enterprise customers deal with constrained budgets and legacy skillsets while still needing to focus on differentiated business outcomes with the most beneficial price/performance and least amount of bring up and maintenance overhead. The options for on-prem Infrastructure aaS offerings allow customers to be nimble and focus on their business value through diverse deployments while maintaining their data security and governance with trusted infrastructure.
  

• Server Growth is Building Vertically. As customers look for the most efficient outcomes from their infrastructure, the industry will continue to see more verticalization and specialization of offerings. Integrated solutions will address packaging and environmental considerations; SW ecosystem enablement and domain-specific accelerators address unique performance and feature requirements that are optimized for specific business outcomes.

• More Data, More Smarts. The challenges with data velocity, volume and volatility continue and require the continuance of AI/ML adoption for analytics while an increased focus on solving data life cycling challenges arises. The integration of data curation models, transport methods, preservation and security architectures with faster analysis will all be key to support and monetize the Internet of Behaviors.

• The Emergence of the Self-Driving Server. Customers will start seeing the use of telemetry, analytics, and policies to achieve higher levels of automation in their systems management infrastructure. Similar to the driver-assist/autonomy levels of autonomous vehicles, AI Ops capabilities with systems management will usher in the era of moving automated tasks to automated decisions, with implementations showing up in addressing runaway system power and policy advising recommendation engines.

• Goodbye, SW Defined. Hello, SW Defined with HW Offload. Application architectures are evolving to create control plane and data plane separation. Control planes stays as a software layer and the data planes move to programmable hardware in the form of service processor add-in-cards which allow bare-metal and containerized applications to run with disaggregated infrastructure software (network virtualization, storage virtualization, GPU virtualization, security services), creating Intent-Based Computing for customer workloads.

• 5G is Here! Seriously, it is this year. After several years of hype and promises, we will see the proliferation of 5G and with it will come shifts in paradigms around communication infrastructure, remote management models and connectivity that impact server form-factors and features. As businesses develop more edge infrastructure to handle the generation and influx of data, 5G will create the need for customers to reevaluate their edge connectivity and infrastructure management offerings to take advantage of 5G capabilities.

• Rethinking Memory and Storage to be Data Centric. The industry is moving from Compute-Centric Architectures to Data-Centric Architectures and that transition is driving new server-connected memory and storage models for IT. Technologies around persistent, encrypted and tiered memory inside the server along with remotely accessed SCM and NVMe oF data through new industry fabric standards are creating innovative IT architectures for optimal data security, scaling and preservation.

• Adopting new Server technology while Being Remote. The world has changed, and businesses have been forced to not just map a digital transformation but realize it to operate. Companies dealing with faster digital transitions of tools, processes and infrastructure need to operate with a remote work force. This transition is forcing companies to evaluate new server technologies and assess resource requirements which will emphasize the necessity to utilize server capabilities around debug, telemetry and analytics in a remote fashion to keep business continuity going forward.

• It’s not a CPU Competition, it’s a Recipe Bake-off. The processor landscape is changing, and it is becoming an environment of acquisitions, specializations and vendor differentiated integrations. We see Intel, AMD and Nvidia all making acquisitions to provide each with CPUs, DPUs and Accelerators in their portfolio. The real winner will be able to leverage their portfolio of silicon products and software libraries to form recipes of integrated offerings for targeted workloads to help end-customers optimize business outcomes.

• Measure your IT Trust Index. Security around server access and data protection has never been more challenging, so customers need to be able to quantify their security confidence in order to gauge infrastructure trustworthiness and identify digital risks. Customers need to analyze product origins and features, new security technologies and segment-specific digital threats in the backdrop of the increasing regulatory landscape to formulate their measurement of IT trust from the Edge to Core to Cloud.

Author: Stephen Rousset, Dell ISG Technology and Innovation Office

Source: https://www.delltechnologies.com/en-us/blog/dells-2021-server-trends-observations/

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This year, organizations found an unprecedented amount of their workforces suddenly working remotely. No longer under the same roof—and network—as their colleagues, IT teams were tasked with making crucial adjustments to how they secure their workforce. With little preparation or planning, IT leaders became responsible for an influx of corporate devices across numerous locations and different networks.  

In 2021, businesses will continue to allow employees to work from home. How can IT ensure they are able to effectively support their organizations in a long-term remote work environment?   

Throughout the remote work revolution, we pulled together some helpful tips to guide IT through some of the challenges of supporting an almost entirely remote workforce. While these tips were written in the early stages of the pandemic, they are worth revisiting as your team looks towards rebuilding and planning in 2021:  

KEEP THE USER TOP OF MIND

It is unlikely most of your employees were prepared to work from home full–time back in March. Throughout the past ten months, your employees have had to alter their physical home environment to accommodate a workspace.  

Some might be missing day-to-day human interaction. Others are probably tired of navigating technical difficulties without an IT admin right down the hall. While it’s unclear when consistently working in an office will be a reality again, one thing is certain: your IT team should be helping new and existing employees feel empowered in their long-term remote work environment.  

For new hires and existing employees, there is plenty of onboarding and technical considerations you should be thinking about: 

• Are new hires using a corporate desktop or their own personal computer?  
• Do employees of every level have a stable internet connection?  
• Can the corporate VPN handle the additional capacity to support a large remote userbase? 
• Does your organization’s helpdesk have the capacity for increased ticket volume?  

Having solutions in place to tackle these technical issues will not only help employees feel supported from an IT perspective but can help prevent potential security threats in the user’s remote work environment – which could ultimately throw a wrench in your business continuity plans.

CHOOSE THE TECHNOLOGY THAT WORKS BEST FOR YOU

When the majority of the workforce went remote, one common question we heard was people asking whether VDI or VPN was a better solution. The answer is not as clear as you may think. 

To determine which option is best for your organization, your IT team must define and rank its top priorities. What will be the fastest, easiest or cheapest for you to deploy for your specific situation? How important are these factors to you? What will provide the best user experience and work for the most users? And what provides the security model that’s appropriate for your organization? 

In the short term, it is wise to do whatever the company was most familiar with, to get employees safely working remotely as soon as possible. But it 2021, organizations may be revisiting this question. Yes, some employees will be coming back into offices, but overall, most organizations will continue to be much more distributed than before 2020.  

As companies optimize their approach to remote work, many will look again at their VDI and VPN strategies and consider some of the pros and cons we wrote about in March. But in addition, they will also take time to consider other initiatives, such as Zero Trust security and Windows 10 management from the cloud.  

BE PROACTIVE WITH INTRINSIC ZERO TRUST SECURITY

Business have had to make adjustments in order to ensure the safety of their employees and the smooth operation of their business. Securing the enterprise is a lot easier when all its endpoints (laptops, mobile devices, etc.), applications and users are within the network perimeter. This model was starting to break down long before this year, but of course the effects of 2020 accelerated this trend like never before. 

To secure the enterprise beyond the perimeter, IT leaders should adopt a Zero Trust security model. Unlike the traditional security model, Zero Trust does not implicitly trust any device, user or app. Instead, it continuously verifies trust across all three before granting access to data.   

This security model offers greater flexibility and choice to employees to work from anywhere and from any device while ensuring optimal security at all times. And while most organizations agree that Zero Trust is the right approach to address the security needs in a dynamic environment, many haven’t taken a holistic approach to deploying it. 

This could coincidentally leave holes in your organization’s security posture, leaving cybercriminals with a valuable opportunity to exploit. In order to proactively secure your reputation and company, employee and customer data, intrinsic security cannot be an after-thought.  

Invest in a solution that helps you prevent, detect and remediate as quickly as possible for business continuity and productivity.  

While these tips have proven useful for employers navigating how to best secure their remote workforce, it’s important to remember that the journey to intrinsic security is just that – a journey.  

As we enter 2021, new techniques will likely emerge as businesses evolve with the world around them. Your IT teams are no different. They must continue working towards solutions that will both empower and protect their staff.

Author: EUC Editorial Team, Vmware

Source: https://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2020/12/tips-for-securing-the-remote-workforce-2021.html?src=so_5fcff0dc35951

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