Looking into 2017, I am heading into the year championing the latest technology trends. Avoiding the hype is always a challenge in our industry, as there are a lot of great technology ideas out there, but few of them are actually executed on properly. My crystal ball tells me that the below trends are going to be top of mind in 2017.
1) Air Gap Technology. It seems that we see some type of hacking or vulnerability/exploit almost on a weekly basis now. We've had customers get attacked by ransomware. Higher ups in government are getting hacked by foreign countries. I really don't see this getting better, which leaves us only one option - to put up more defenses. Air Gaps for your data can guarantee that you always have "roll back" infrastructure to rely upon. A duplicate copy of your critical data is kept onsite in a secondary location that is only accessible by the single person that is responsible for getting you back up and running. This data is backed up according to your recovery point objectives and is immediately secluded physically from your network after the backup is complete. After the sytems are secluded, the standalone environment will run through a series of consistency checks that guarantees your data is safe. After this, the system shuts itself down until the next backup cycle, certifying that nothing can attack it after the data has been proven clean. Dell EMC Isolated Recovery is our sole solution providing air gaps.
2) Hybrid Datacenter. As mentioned in an earlier blog post, CXO's and business ownership is now expecting some cloud strategy out of their IT division. Nearly any infrastructure that you acquire for your on-premise datacenter now has some sort of "cloudable" component to it. Our highest success has been in the backup space and software defined datacenter space, where people spill over their on-premise infrastructure to some sort of public provided cloud. Also, many of our customers are starting to build private clouds to give them the look at feel of a public cloud, but house the infrastructure on premise.
3) Video/File Based Storage. We had huge growth towards the end of 2016 with businesses that need to store vast amounts of video data. It seems nearly all business have a need for this. Public safety departments are all doing body cams and police video. Ballparks are putting in large storage clusters to monitor security. Broadcast companies are allowing consumers to store their movies and recorded television in large clouds. For storing this vast amount of video data in a manner with low costs and easy administration/maintenance, we are relying upon the best solution in the world for this. Dell EMC Isilon.
4) Big Data/Unstructured Data. Businesses are forced to make quicker and smarter decisions to keep up with competition. Big Data and Analytics allow these businesses to make smarter decisions on a quicker basis. What if you could gather all aspects of data on your business, keep them in one place, and run a quick "common english language" query tool on the front end to make a decision in seconds rather than days or months? It is happening. One customer of ours is gathering voicemail recordings, intercompany chat session, social media posts, CRM database info, wireless access point traffic information, and searches all found on Google. They are using this information to make a better decision on where to target their sales people. This data is too large and too complex (too many different types of data) to store in a structured database. Instead, they are using tools like Hadoop, Cloudera, and Hortonworks powered by Dell EMC to help make safe decisions for their organization.
5) Hyperconverged Infrastructure. How do you manage your datacenter today? Do you have servers, storage, and networking as separate infrastructure? Do you manage all of it, or do you have a team that manages each? Hyperconvergence changes this landscape in a big way, and we see 2017 as the year of explosion for this. By converging the compute (servers), storage (SAN), and Hypervisor onto standard X86 hardware, one expertise level can manage it all with software. The solutions that Cyber Advisors supports all fall under the Dell EMC umbrella. Nutanix, VxRail/Rack, and VMWare VSAN are all great Hyperconverged solutions that lead the industry. If you are due to refresh storage or servers, you must take a look.
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