2021 has been quite the year with its own unique trials and tribulations from supply chain issues to soaring cloud demand. Businesses spent a lot of time this year getting back on track and getting settled in their new environments while embracing new ways of doing business. Connectria was happy to step in to lend a helping hand.

After such rapid transformation in 2020, many organizations found themselves dealing with a more complex, less integrated IT structure than ever in 2021. Our managed services team has spent a lot of time this past year working with clients to ensure they’re getting the performance they need from their systems without driving up IT costs or compromising security.

While 2020 taught us that nothing is guaranteed to stay the same, 2021 taught us that things don’t go back to “normal” overnight. Through all of this, Connectria has continued to be there for our customers providing the expertise and support they need when they need it. Hopefully, things will start to even out in 2022. Below are some trends, concerns, and opportunities we’ll be keeping an eye on in the coming months ahead.

Public cloud usage will continue to grow

Trend – As fast as organizations moved workloads to the cloud in 2021, they’re not done yet. Much of this growth will be in public cloud (including multi-tenant cloud) services. Specifically, Gartner predicts spending on public cloud services will increase by 21.7 percent in 2022; by 2026, it will account for more than 45 percent of all IT spending. Considering that public cloud spending only accounted for 17 percent of enterprise IT spending in 2021, this is a significant increase.

Concern – Public clouds are often seen as a quick source of capacity and a way to keep IT infrastructure costs down. They can be, but they can also be a source of tremendous headaches, from performance issues to security breaches, if not configured correctly. There’s also the issue of disconnects between public cloud workloads and those that still reside on-premises or in a private cloud.

Opportunity – The technologies available to help monitor public clouds continue to evolve, and many of them now incorporate AI and Machine learning. Nevertheless, a public cloud should not be seen as a DIY project unless you have an experienced staff who understands the ins and outs of each cloud platform. Connectria provides tools you can use to monitor public cloud performance and security, as well as a host of cloud migration and managed services to help you confidently migrate workloads to a public cloud.

Cloud Cost Optimization Will Continue to be a Top Priority

Trend – According to the Flexera State of the Cloud report, 61 percent of respondents planned to optimize cloud costs in 2021. That was a high priority for many of our customers as well. However, if you’re looking for an initiative to check off your list, cloud cost control isn’t it, so we expect it to be a high priority in 2022 as well.

Concern – As noted in the first trend, many organizations migrate workloads to a public cloud to help control costs. But one of the public cloud’s greatest advantages – the ability to quickly spin up extra capacity – is also one of the reasons cloud costs can quickly escalate out of control. There are cloud management tools available, but they are often designed to target a single platform, and not all of them focus on cloud cost optimization.

Opportunity – TRIA, from Connectria, is a cloud management platform that allows enterprises to monitor spending across multiple public clouds and even private clouds. TRIA’s cloud optimization features can help you predict monthly cloud spend and quickly spot opportunities to get costs back under control. If you’re not yet using TRIA, we can also perform this analysis for you to demonstrate how much TRIA can help you save.

Enterprises Will Stay True to the Blue, But in the Cloud

Trend – For our third trend, we’ll move away from the public cloud and focus on private clouds, and specifically on IBM Power Systems. While X86 fans might like you to believe that everyone is replatforming applications before migrating to the cloud, that’s not actually the case. In fact, a 2020 IDC survey found that businesses that modernized but remained on the IBM platform were more satisfied than those that replatformed to a different system.

Concern – As satisfied as they are with the platform, organizations that leverage IBM Power Systems are much like any other: They’re constantly looking for ways to control costs. Often, that means leveraging multiple platforms within their business and using a variety of SaaS applications for various functions. Such a diverse infrastructure can be hard to manage and lead to disconnects between systems and inefficiencies in IT.

Opportunity – Connectria has long-served the IBM Power Systems community with private cloud hosting on the IBM i and AIX platforms as well as remote monitoring and managed services. We also offer IBM Power Systems cloud on-net with AWS. This state-of-the-art offering provides for an ultra-low latency direct connection between your IBM i/AIX workloads and AWS instances.

Help For Whatever 2022 Brings

No matter what 2022 brings, Connectria is here to help guide you through with people, processes, and technology that support your digital transformation goals. Visit our website to discover all that we have to offer, and when you’re ready, reach out to us using the link below to set up a consultation with one of our experts.

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