5 IT Trends to Look For in 2016

By Shannon Snowden, Zerto’s Sr. Technical Architect

As we are closing out January, it’s time to put 2015 in our rear-view mirror and look ahead to the 5 IT trends coming down the road in 2016.

1) Big mergers and acquisitions will continue.
There have been some major acquisitions lately in the storage and data protection industry. NetApp recently bought Solidfire and the big one, Dell bought EMC. Each of these demonstrates a necessary shift in the hardware industry, which is feeling increased pressure from cloud vendors and converged system startups. These will not be the last of the big changes with the established hardware vendors, as they scramble to compete with a changing consumer base.

2) Cloud Service Providers will see increased adoption by enterprise customers.
This actually has already started to happen. We have customers that have begun shifting parts of their existing disaster recovery to AWS or to one of our over 200 Cloud Service Providers (CSP). CSPs can offer many advantages to business owners with competitive predictable pricing. Additionally, as the disruption in the hardware industry continues seeking stability, CSPs are increasingly being seen as a more stable, predictable investment with clear ROI.

3) Disparate systems management and orchestration will continue to increase as customers seek to drive down operational costs, even when going to dissimilar systems and platforms.
Even if their hardware vendor was sold and the platforms are discontinued, customers should be able to continue to use those resources efficiently.  As the cloud service providers continue to improve their service offerings, it’s not unlikely that, regardless of the hardware production status, the migration from physical resources to cloud services will be happening with more regularity. A software management and orchestration layer will increasingly gain in importance. Look for a solution that can grow with your changing infrastructure and is open enough to manage via APIs.

4) Data center architectures will start to move from virtual machine-centric to cloud and non virtual machine-centric design.
Cloud Service Providers offer services that replace traditional in-house services. For example core infrastructure components like user authentication, IP address allocation, and name resolution, all the way up through database hosting and business intelligence capabilities.
Data center architects and management will start to incorporate these next generation components into their designs and implementations.  Just as data center architects moved away from physical servers to virtual machines for efficiency, the corollary will happen with virtual machines being replaced with cloud services and some cloud services using containerization.  We are not at a tipping point yet, but 2016 will be a good year for these new ways of doing IT.

5) The visionary disaster recovery solutions will continue to transform traditional DR into something more.
When you can protect workloads across multiple platforms, including public and private clouds, you will naturally figure out more ways to use the solution past its initial use case of disaster recovery. Data center migrations, business acquisitions, and strategic IT solutions can all be done with the right DR software. So, if you are only using your DR product for disaster recovery, you have the wrong solution.

Please feel free to share with us your thoughts, in the comments below, for any IT trends you think we will see in 2016.