As the world enters the post pandemic period of heightened digital transformation, new challenges have emerged which businesses (and their data) will have to navigate.  In the face of increased economic pressure, digital transformation and cloud initiatives are set to focus on creating efficiencies through costs and resources.

To help organizations steer through these (potentially) choppy waters, we’ve gathered thoughts from some Commvault key opinion leaders.??

Param Kumarasamy, VP, Product Management
– Resilience and Cloud Native Technologies

In 2023, the economic uncertainty will continue to grow in the midst of massive data growth and increasingly constrained IT resources. This will result in moving the enterprises from transformation initiatives into a resiliency. We expect the executives to take defensive posture to address known issues and doing more with constrained resources. IT resiliency initiatives will increase the adoption of AI/ML technologies such as self-monitoring and management of IT assets and automation and orchestration of IT activities across on-premises and cloud.

In last few years we have seen tremendous growth in Hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud initiatives across the enterprises. In 2023, we expect organizations to double down on cloud native technologies. Similar to the physical to virtualization shift, we will see enterprises moving from virtualization technologies to adopt more and more Kubernetes, containers, and DevOps across on-premise and cloud deployments.

Reza Morakabati, Chief Information Officer –
CIOs need a holistic approach to data protection

As we enter 2023, CIOs will need to take a holistic, situational approach when assessing their data storage target map. Companies may blindly adopt cloud or on-prem based on general recommendations, but the decision should be highly dependent upon how the data will be used.

CIOs need to focus on five main areas – scalability, flexibility, agility, security, and cost. Cloud for instance checks off many of these boxes, but could account for a significant portion of a CIO’s operating budget, whereas data center investments are mostly allocated to capital budgets. It is critical for CIOs to look at the full picture.

Matt Tyrer, Senior Solutions Marketing Manager
and Head of Competitive Intelligence – Data Diversification and Mobility?

The number of applications, clouds, platforms, utilities, tools, and various other data workloads and locations to run them is multiplying. Just to frame this a little let’s just look at one of the bigger providers out there, AWS.  Prior to AWS reInvent in late November 2022, they had over 200 applications and services within their catalog for customers to leverage and build on. They then introduced at their annual event another 50+ including many highly specialized databases and tools.

That’s a lot, and that’s just one vendor.?With this growing diversification is my prediction, and one seconded by Gartner?at their recent IT Infrastructure, Operations, and Cloud Strategies Conference in Las Vegas just a few weeks ago:?

The applications and workloads you are running today, and where you are running them, will not be the applications and workloads or places where you will be running them in tomorrow.?

The impact here is equally diverse.  

• Skills Shortages:?The constant shifting of data workloads will mean that most organizations will not have the in-house skills to keep up with the changing platforms and services they are depending on to drive their business forward and remain competitive.?
• Data Protection/Management Challenges:?It is already a daunting task ensuring that all of your data sources are not only protected but secured from the growing threats to them. Many businesses are stuck relying on multiple niche or point product solutions in order to tackle this challenge because there simply are not many options out there that can cover it ALL. Now imagine all of those data sources and applications moving and changing on a regular basis, most tools today just can’t keep up and this will lead to overlapping siloes adding complexity, cost, and overall risk to the business.?

To address this, businesses will be turning more and more to partners who provide the broadest possible spectrum of support for data protection and data management to ensure that as their data platforms change, their solutions not only can keep pace, but already provide the needed coverage. This will enable organizations to adapt and transform with significantly less friction as they don’t need to revisit data protection and management with each step. This also supports a number of other initiatives such as sustainability and ESG as it enables the consolidation of tools and reduction of infrastructure and consumption of other resources such as the power and water that fuel that infrastructure.?

Hope D’Amore, Solutions Marketing Manager
– Cloud-Native will become the norm

Digital transformation is needed to maintain a level of innovation and competitiveness within the market. Add in a turbulent and uncertain economy and businesses will need to focus on cloud cost management to strike a balance between the two. Some may think a cloud-native adoption would take the back burner during these uncertain times, but a recent survey from Forrester reports that forty percent of firms will take a cloud-native-first strategy in 2023. Organizations will invest more in cloud-native technologies, such as Kubernetes, to realize greater efficiencies instead of continuing to invest in legacy infrastructure.

As the shift to cloud-native environments becomes the norm, security will continue to be top of mind and Commvault is here to help. We provide the most comprehensive and flexible portfolio of solutions for containers. Store, protect, and migrate your Kubernetes applications wherever they live across hybrid multi-cloud environments. To learn more about how Commvault data protection can increase efficiencies within your cloud-native environment, visit Commvault.com/containers.

Forrester, Predictions 2023: Cloud Computing, October 27, 2022

What do you think? What plans does your business have in the digital transformation and cloud areas? Are you planning on investing more in containerization this year?

Let us know on social media.