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Four IT trends in 2012

1. Downtime tolerance has diminished

There is almost no tolerance with IT downtime these days. As people have adopted cloud services in their personal lives; be it through Dropbox, Microsoft SkyDrive or any other tool, they have come to expect their data to be available when they want it. Over the past year, consumer expectation levels have increased and this has impacted the way that businesses operate.

2. IT spend is held in the hands of a powerful few

In Singapore and across Aisa, we have been seeing IT spend signed off by just a few very senior executives in the business. This is in contrast to Australia and New Zealand for example, which will often give virtualisation admins control over the tools they buy. With the economic climate still looking uncertain in many markets, spend is understandingly being controlled by a select few.

3. Cloud has been a big hit with SMEs

2012 has been the year that Disaster Recovery as a Service has really taken off, particularly with small and medium sized businesses. For Veeam, the cloud part of our business has been one of the fastest growing areas in Asia this year and it is something I’m asked about by almost every customer or partner I meet. Clearly, businesses are keen on the monthly billable disaster recovery model, as opposed to one big capital outlay.

4. Businesses have become even more data dependent

Major disasters like Hurricane Sandy in the US, the Thailand floods and the earthquakes in New Zealand and Japan have highlighted the vulnerability of vital company information. These natural disasters have taught us that it’s not just physical assets like stock, but digital records, financials and company information that really make a business. Intoday’s technology dependent age, companies have learnt to become more resilient, but also plan for all the eventualities that could wipe out their business.

Predictions for 2013

1. Cloud will continue to grow

Lots of larger companies that are traditionally less agile will be wading into the cloud conversation in a much bigger way. They’re thinking about how they will get to the cloud and how they guarantee it’ll work successfully. Understandably, they are often cautious about privacy, systems integration and security, but it’s often a case of changing mindset.

2. IT spend will go ‘pay-as-you-go’

Gartner predicts that IT spend will hit $100bn globally by 2016 and investment is clearly a high priority. As businesses embrace SaaS models, we can expect to see them moving away from capital expenditure to operational expenditure in 2013. The good IT manager uses all the tools at their disposal and there are some great specialized tools out there, in data mining for example. We’ve got to the point where these tools don’t need to be in the building anymore: they’re elsewhere.

3. IT skills will move to a ‘cloud model’

In the same way that businesses are engaging with multiple cloud suppliers for their services, they are taking a similar standpoint with their IT skills. As we see technology gravitating to the cloud, the skills of IT professionals are gravitating to the cloud too.This is reflected in vendors’ certification programmes, like Microsoft’s Private Cloud qualification. We’ve seen businesses with fairly sophisticated virtual environments but no in-house experience in it at all. They have disaster-recovery-as-a-service because they don’t want to do it and have to maintain the skills.

4. Virtualisation will become more entwined with the business

There are still lots of businesses that operate in siloes and virtualisation admins are an obvious one. Where I see a big skills gap is bringing departments together so they can talk to each other, whether it’s the database team, security team or department that looks after back up. When it comes to disaster recovery, it needs to be the responsibility of people right across the business and communication is key.