Customer experience will become the key to success in the "storage as a service" market
Today, the “As-a-Service” consumption model is already the basic condition for market competition. At the same time, the requirements of corporate customers are getting higher and higher. By 2021, such services must continue to prove their value, because such services are too easy to activate and deactivate, and customers may feel that existing services no longer meet their needs and suspend services at any time. This means that customer service must extend beyond the purchase to provide a more meticulous customer experience. If we divide good customer experience into several levels: the most basic level is to respond quickly, the next level is to actively let customers understand the problem, and the highest level is to let customers know that problems that have occurred but have been resolved . In the coming year, the distinction between "product subscription" (that is, renting) and true "as a service" solutions will become even clearer. In other words, what the customer buys is an outcome (such as a service level agreement) that it needs to be handed over to a third party. Any "as-a-service" should allow customers to conduct small-scale trials first, and then gradually expand their use over time. At the same time, pricing and key performance indicators need to be completely transparent, so that customers cannot feel that they are completely dependent on themselves after purchase, or that they are stuck in a service that is not better than traditional asset procurement methods.
The "combination punch" for enterprises to improve efficiency: containers and Kubernetes that will become mainstream in 2021
Containers and Kubernetes, these two "combination punches" used by companies to improve efficiency have completely changed the way we develop and execute applications. By 2025, Gartner predicts that 85% of global companies will run containers in production, an increase of 35% from 2019. For the digital leaders of the enterprise, the basic module construction of these microservices not only makes the operation of the enterprise more flexible, but also provides a reliable application development method, so it has become the mainstream for a long time. Microservices architecture wins in its flexibility and resilience, and those digital native service giants also recognized the competitive advantages of microservices early on. In 2021, containers and Kubernetes will remain the two cores for enterprises to promote and expand their long-term digital transformation plans. In fact, containers no longer just stay at an "interesting technology" level in the discussion of CIOs, but new applications and digital touchpoints, which will completely become the mainstream. CIOs will understand that their team can have a solution toolbox that allows them to complete tasks at the speed they dreamed of 5 or 10 years ago, such as using streaming data to provide real-time personality to tens of millions of customers around the world化服务.
Object storage is smarter: although it will rise again, it cannot completely replace archives
20 years ago, objects were regarded as a slightly clumsy but extremely scalable data storage method, that is, all intelligence, metadata, and annotations were stored in another database in some form. This structure works well before the data scale reaches a certain level. However, with the explosive growth of data and object storage filled with billions of unstructured data (Blob), its architecture has become difficult to implement. More and more companies hope to investigate and analyze their own data, so as to avoid the problem of integrating file and object storage systems. Therefore, there is an increasing demand for embedding key metadata in data objects, not only to improve performance, but also to be more intelligent.
Object storage is very suitable for the rise of cloud platforms and the modern big data environment. What customers ultimately want is a system that is both scalable and flexible enough to meet the challenges of modern unstructured data. Although object storage may be re-emerging, it does not solve all problems. Although the object itself has high scalability, it cannot be modified individually, such as opening an object to modify a few bytes in it. Therefore, to complete all the workflows of an application, object storage alone is not enough. Although high-speed file storage is not a new concept, it is a pioneering effort to integrate file and object storage on the same platform because it can avoid the creation of two data islands and reduce complexity. Therefore, integrated file and object storage is the future trend. And in 2021, we will witness it move towards the mainstream.
2021 will be the foundation year of distributed/edge cloud
Although the Distributed/Edge Cloud architecture is generally still in the planning and testing stage, with the rapid growth of 5G and IoT connected devices, coupled with the sharp increase in edge data sources, and Kubernetes has gradually become a microservice The standard for the coordination of applications and containers, 2021 will be a crucial year for laying the foundation for this new cloud form. Gartner believes that distributed cloud is the first cloud type to include the geographic location of cloud services. In this way, enterprises can manage distributed components across multiple clouds, thereby releasing the potential for deploying more highly customized IT services and deriving additional value from data sources at edge locations. Some industries with high IT/OT convergence and generating large amounts of data in remote and regional locations, such as mining, oil and gas, and hydropower utilities, will take the lead in benefiting from distributed clouds.
Sustainable development: from supply chain trends to corporate obligations
The issue of sustainable development is not just a key global supply chain trend. In 2021, sustainable development will become an obligation of enterprises. Each purchase decision of a company will include its own carbon footprint target as one of its considerations. And as the World Economic Forum and the European Union are promoting the standardization of evaluation indicators to reduce the occurrence of so-called "greenwashing", companies will take more responsibility for their actions. Within the data center, the production, consumption and storage of data has skyrocketed, and its energy consumption has made it difficult to achieve sustainable development. According to the US Department of Energy (Department of Energy) statistics, the energy consumed by each floor of the data center is 10 to 50 times that of a general commercial office building. This makes data center-level green storage technology the key to reducing the complexity and overhead of modern data infrastructure and reducing its carbon footprint and parts waste. The fact is that what we should think about is no longer how fast we can promote technological development, but how to provide these technologies in a sustainable way so that they can continue for generations.
