‘Tis the Season for Predictions - A Look at Enterprise Data

January 3, 2014

If the close to 2013 with its abundance of funding and acquisition news is any indicator for 2014, then we are in for excitement. We’ve seen major movement over the past few months from vendors, which illustrates that enterprise technology will take major strides in 2014. Not only are industry veterans shifting their focus into the enterprise space, but there are new companies on the rise attempting to get their hands on the fast growing market share. A more specific focus for this space has been data management. Enterprise data has become comparable to a hidden gem; it is very valuable and hard to harness and protect. From mobility to security, classification to access, enterprise data will be under a large microscope. With that in mind, I have put together a few of my predictions for the space in 2014.

US Cloud Providers will Get Hit Hard in Europe

Thanks to revelations by Edward Snowden, European customers are seriously threatened by the public cloud and are not trusting business data in the hands of US cloud providers. There will be a big drop in European adoption of the public cloud, due to the increase in privacy concerns. If Congress gets its act together and enables more transparency for the NSA programs, this can be softened. The industry needs to develop more innovative and foolproof architectures to overcome what will be a difficult 2014 in Europe.

The Deconstruction of Cloud Apps

I firmly believe this will be the year that cloud apps will become deconstructed. When I say deconstructed, I think it is similar to how the mainframe stack was separated years ago. There will be some apps where the entire stack cannot live in the cloud due to the need to leverage infrastructure and investments behind the firewall. While some cloud apps will remain as self-contained entities, many apps will separate the cloud app or service from the underlying infrastructure to fully protect business data from compliance issues and save bandwidth when uploading and downloading large business files aka adhering to Data Gravity.

Hybrid Cloud Implementations Continue to Take Storm

No matter what the pure cloud providers say or claim, a hybrid approach is here to stay in 2014. Based on many recent surveys, security is still the top concern for enterprises when it comes to the cloud. Enterprises will not be comfortable putting mission-critical information such as intellectual property, financial data, HR paperwork, and regulated data in the public cloud. There will be a strong need for keeping this data stored on-premises and, at the same time, still make it easily accessible to employees, even on mobile devices.

Enterprise data is nothing to take lightly, and as new technologies are being introduced every day, it is making it difficult for businesses to keep their data truly private. 2014 will be a transitional year for enterprises as they wade through the obstacles and embrace new and old technologies to access and share their data securely.