The following are the abstract of NetApp 2022 predictions.

“Digital First” As New Business Paradigm
While IT teams and IT leaders are historically called on to drive digitization and increase value, the roles will be reversed in the post-pandemic world. Strategic decision-making starts with digital experience and digital transformation since they are now deeply connected to the successful operation of any company.
We see this for example in business analytics, where the analysis of user experience journeys or customer experience journeys become a crucial information source for strategic decisions.

Cybersecurity and Resiliency
The pandemic months have triggered a rapid increase in ransomware attacks as more and more people worked remotely. Coincidentally, this opened up a multitude of new infection vectors. Enterprises had to come to terms with the fact that many IT security processes and protocols are not well suited to the fight against ransomware, because it is virtually impossible to cut off all these infection routes, especially when criminals use social engineering. Instead, enterprises will rely on AI-based prevention across their whole domain and stringent zero trust policies. Rather than preventing IT attacks from happening, this approach minimizes their impact. Once an infection happens, it is discovered almost instantaneously: Infected areas are cordoned off and infected files are replaced in almost real-time.

Sustained Impact of the Pandemic: Cloud Acceleration and the Supply Chain
The global supply chain has been brought close to its breaking point by the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on air, sea, and land travel. We predict that cloud adoption will accelerate faster as the supply chain constraints drive buyers to find alternatives to purchasing traditional on-premise infrastructure to meet demands. At the same time, optimization of production lines and business processes can help the system to become more robust in the future.

Productized AI
In 2022, artificial intelligence (AI) starts to permeate all industries. We will see it used in agriculture, food production, fast-food chains, and the entertainment and hospitality sector. Agriculture and the food industry, for example, will use it for packing and processing, while other sectors gain most from general automation and the simplification of their processes.

Data trends
Several technology sub-trends drive change and innovation. One is Analytics & Optimization of digital services. E.g., Finops results are much easier to come by as more automation and smarter applications take hold. This results in increased ROI from cloud investments throughout the public and private sectors.
Another trend concerns production environments. There is a clear move away from applications as companies deliver their services through containerized solutions and microservices.

Sustainability – ESG Becomes a Competitive Advantage
Green topics are on the rise, as demonstrated by the 2021 Climate Change Conference, the US infrastructure deal, or the traffic light coalition coming to power in Germany. We predict that businesses will head in the same direction. This is partly due to regulatory pressure, for example, to lower carbon dioxide emissions. But enterprises will also become intrinsically motivated to deliver green innovation.

The hybrid models, which allow companies to recruit talent everywhere, reduce office footprint, and significantly cut work travel.

Key findings in the survey include despite the cost of Flash technology decreasing, 40 percent of IT decision makers think it is too expensive to invest in. The apparent cost barrier is most prevalent amongst smaller businesses.

90 percent of respondents admitted there was a need for Flash within their businesses. IT decision makers from medium sized businesses are the strongest advocates of Flash, with 94 percent agreeing that ‘a lack of need for Flash solutions’ is not a barrier to Flash adoption.

IT decision makers revealed that one in five financial decision makers (22 percent) within enterprises do not have sufficient understanding of the benefits of Flash technology to make an investment. This barrier is most pronounced among larger enterprises, with almost one quarter of respondents stating financial decision makers do not know enough about Flash technology..

“For many businesses looking to digitally transform, the idea of an All-Flash data center has become a practical reality,” said Fadi Kanafani, Regional Director Middle East & Africa. “However, despite the introduction of new high capacity drives and downward pricing trends of Flash technologies, our research shows that there is still work to be done to educate business leaders on the true value of Flash. We are working to remove the barriers and risk to Flash adoption, so customers can realise the promise of an All-Flash data center, simply and cost-effectively.”

“The true benefit of Flash storage is less power, less cooling, less space and less moving parts in combination with higher performance,” explains Peter Wüst, NetApp Senior Director Emerging Solutions & Innovation Group EMEA. “Flash, together with NetApp software to manage data more efficiently between clouds in a scale-out fashion, enables the digital transformation.”

NetApp delivers one of the industry’s broadest portfolio of All-Flash arrays, providing customers with the scale, speed and data services required for the next-generation data center. The NetApp Flash portfolio helps customers achieve the best outcomes across priority deployment models including performance applications, virtualised infrastructure and cloud-like infrastructure.