Five Scenarios That Will Impact 2018 Infrastructure Plans and Budget

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Nov 28, 2017, 07:30 ET

TORONTO, Nov. 28, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Businesses often struggle with complex technology challenges year round, but when looking toward 2018, there are scenarios that are likely to impact business, business data, and budgeting.

Experts at ioFABRIC Inc. offered the following predictions about what IT departments can expect in 2018:

1. Rise in Ransomware
IT organizations should expect an increase in malicious attacks in 2018, with recent predictions that cybercrime will rise to $2.1 trillion by 2019. This clearly calls for added steps in data protection.

"We recommend immutable storage snapshots, which cannot be modified or encrypted by ransomware," advised Steven Lamb, CEO and Co-Founder at ioFABRIC.

2. Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence will continue to reduce manual setup and administration, minimize human error, and ultimately improve operations, along with operational costs.

"AI-based technology can be self-configuring, efficient, and cooperative," said Lamb. "We're in the early stages of seeing AI in enterprise technology, and we are excited to see it evolve in 2018."

3. Cost Optimization
Businesses are still concerned with costs, and in 2018 affordable solutions will make headway. Custom or branded hardware will continue to lose ground to the combination of commodity hardware plus software-defined infrastructures.

"Software intelligence that provides analysis will be increasingly desirable," said Lamb. "In order to stay competitive, software-defined infrastructures will need their own cost intelligence to provide consistent premium performance at least cost."

4. Evergreen Technology
Hardware upgrades are costly and complex, so the emphasis in 2018 will be evergreen infrastructures that will never again require forklift upgrades. Data migrations will become a thing of the past as intelligent software continually manages this complex process.

"Data Fabrics can use evergreen technology to allow storage hardware to be seamlessly swapped in and out. Customers can combine new or existing hardware to improve data availability while safely extending the life of existing storage," said Lamb.

5. Climate Change
Environmental experts say to expect more severe weather. IT departments will take steps to protect data, including synchronous replication to multiple locations.

"It is essential to budget for appropriate storage solutions for data continuity and disaster recovery—this means adopting a multi-location, multi-cloud model," said Lamb. "Unfortunately there are practical challenges with managing multiple copies of data in multiple locations, so administrators performing this manually need to prepare for a learning curve."

About ioFABRIC Inc.
ioFABRIC Inc. is a data management company whose software delivers a multi-site, multi-cloud data fabric that ensures complete data protection and availability with artificial intelligence and industry-unique cost optimization features. ioFABRIC Vicinity ensures storage is always available, always protected, and always evergreen. Vicinity creates a data fabric supporting applications running on servers, VMs, containers, and clouds. Vicinity is sold through ioFABRIC's reseller and distribution channel as licensed software or by white-labeling it with additional hardware and/or software. For more information visit www.iofabric.com.

SOURCE ioFABRIC Inc.