The year 2021 demonstrated the importance of technology. Many companies redesigned their IT infrastructure – some followed the market wave and quickly developed, the others experienced the disadvantages of on-prem and decided to virtualize, while the third ones were forced to do so because of changes in legislation and working conditions.
Most of the 2021 trends are still relevant in 2022. Moreover, if the pandemic gets worse, cloud technology will play an even greater role in business operations. The demand for cloud technology will grow in the coming years, and enterprises must develop a pragmatic cloud plan that embodies a high level of security, user experience, and cloud hybridization to provide a secure and scalable business ecosystem.
Moving from on-premise to cloud
IT-Infrastructure is not just about physical servers. The staff of technicians and their training, the cost of electricity and cooling of the server room, licenses, regular upgrades of equipment – all this should also be included in the total cost of IT infrastructure. In addition, if the company has special requirements for hardware (for example, to comply with the local laws), the list is extended with certification, as well as the purchase of crypto-gateways and other software and hardware.
When it comes to on-premise, all expenses are borne by the company. It is expensive, complex, and in some cases even inconvenient. Therefore, at the very beginning of the pandemic period, many companies moved their own hardware to data centers and considered partial or full virtualization of the infrastructure. Subsequently, this trend has become an important factor in preserving the normal functioning of the business while reducing costs.
VDI
The mass transition to remote work would not be possible without cloud-based virtual desktop infrastructure, VDI. With this technology, companies can allocate the right amount of resources to each employee's virtual machine and, if necessary, quickly scale up or down performance.
Since data, including sensitive information, is stored in the provider's data center and virtual machines are isolated from each other, the administration is simplified. It is easier to set up backups, update software, and monitor user activity especially compared to physical computers.
Cloud containerization
With the growing demand to have applications ready for the cloud, monolithic legacy applications are changing to a microservices-based architecture. Microservices-based applications must be containerized and managed through an orchestration platform.
Containers provide a powerful tool to address a number of mission-critical issues for application developers, including the need for faster delivery, flexibility, portability, modernization, and lifecycle management. In 2022, the demand for containerization technology is expected to increase.
In 2021, 42% of developers said that their organizations used containers, and according to Forrester Research that will grow to over half of all organizations in 2022.
Cloud vGPU
vGPU computing technology has been actively used by retailers, developers, R&D centers, architectural firms, and other organizations that constantly have to perform high intensive calculations. Using a GPU can run calculations up to 10 times faster than a CPU. According to a report by Global Market Insights, Inc. the ever-increasing demand for advanced graphics processing is a major factor driving the market trends for graphics processing units (GPUs). GPUs play a key role in graphics-intensive applications such as image processing, 3D visualization, and many others. These applications require massive computations that cannot be performed by the CPU alone.
The growing trend of providing GPU computing through cloud services will drive the adoption of the cloud deployment model. The benefit of the technology is the ability to get the data you need quickly and to pay for the capacity you actually use, without having to worry about idling expensive hardware.
The adoption of technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) will drive high demand for graphics cards.
Cloud-based AI technologies
Clouds and artificial intelligence are closely related, as AI increases the demand for cloud computing, which plays a key role in developing and making AI services more accessible. Cloud services help democratize AI, making it more accessible, better, and convenient.
AI helps the cloud manage data and retrieve valuable information, while the cloud provides continuous backup and recovery of data in a virtual environment. The development and evolution of cloud technology and artificial intelligence are interconnected, and this will become even more evident in 2022.
Hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure
A hybrid cloud is not a compromise between different approaches, but rather a combination of their strong features. The private cloud is a good example of this. Data that requires fast and frequent access can be stored on public servers, while sensitive data remains on private servers with restricted access. A well-integrated and balanced hybrid strategy brings companies the best of each technology.
Most organizations have overcome the initial phase of migrating some of the workloads from an on-premises environment to a cloud provider and want to better manage the technology available to them. This encourages them to look at multi-cloud environments that utilize services from several different vendors.
The multi-cloud model helps companies choose different cloud offerings that best suit their unique application environments, business requirements, and availability needs. In the future, more organizations will need to develop fully cloud-based applications that are almost independent of the architecture of any particular cloud provider.
While hybrid cloud and multi-cloud strategies are already widely used in large organizations, in 2022 more and more enterprises will understand the benefits of these models and use them to provide elasticity and flexibility in the cloud.
