My Top 6 Predictions For 2021

As 2020 draws to a close, I wanted to look forward to some of the areas that I believe are going to be critical in our industry in 2021.

1)   The Dawn Of The Omni Cloud Era

2020 has seen a major surge in the use of cloud technology, a significant portion of which can be attributed to Covid-19 and the impact that has had on businesses and how they have been able to operate. Many organisations, not just those in the Enterprise, now have multiple cloud providers. Moving workloads to a cloud provider is becoming easier, however moving workloads from one cloud provider to another is still a major challenge. 

Throughout 2020, we’ve seen vendors coming to market with solutions help to address these issues. In the Exclusive Networks portfolio we have been delighted to start a partnership with RStor. Their Transporter technology allows organisations to move vast quantities of data at high speed between clouds and regions, helping to break down the siloes of the multi cloud. Additionally the investment that Exclusive Networks has made in the acquisition of Nuaware, a bleeding edge Cloud Native & Devops Distributor provides a solid foundation for helping our vendors and partners enter the Omni Cloud Era

2)   Data, Data, Data…..

It’s a frequently quoted statement that ‘90% of the world’s data has been created in the last 2 years’, whether that fact is completely true or not is open to debate, however one fact that is inarguable is that the volumes of data being created are accelerating rapidly and show no signs of slowing. As technologies such as 5G and IOT continue to gain traction, these will become further force multipliers for the volumes of data.

The sheer volumes of data created cause all sorts of headaches for organisations. According to a recent IBM study poor data quality costs the US economy up to $3.1 trillion annually.  

It’s not just the volume of data, it’s the type of data being created as well, according to a recent CIO survey at least 80% of all new data created is unstructured and a Forbes survey found that 95% of businesses view the volume of unstructured data as being a major problem for them to address, in terms of how and where they store it and how they can manage and analyse it to maximise their business value.

Working with vendors such as Rubrik, Pure Storage, Tintri, Cloudian and Rstor in our portfolio, Exclusive Networks is ideally placed to help our partners to address some of these key challenges that these rapidly increasing data volumes causes. 

3)   Cyber Security & Cloud Infrastructure Convergence Will Accelerate

Historically, the world of Cyber Security and Cloud Infrastructure rarely met. For many working in the Cloud & Infrastructure business, security was something that was always bolted on top of their offerings, not intrinsic to it. For the traditional Cyber Security players, the infrastructure part of the business wasn’t their speciality and they left it to others. 

Over this past 12 months, we’ve seen these two worlds converging at a rapid rate and I believe that this will further accelerate throughout 2021. With organisations data residing in a much larger number of locations and being more portable, simply trying to bolt security on top is not going to work as potential attack surfaces increase in size and become more fluid.

As the worlds largest Cyber Security distributor, Exclusive Networks is exceptionally well placed to help our partners and our vendors to take advantage of this convergence of these two worlds. 

4)   Eco System Alliances Will Become Ever More Important

As the pace of change and technology development increases, vendors will increasingly rely more heavily on their technical partnerships in order to deliver innovative solutions that meet the demands of their customer base. 

Many historical ‘Technology Alliance Partnerships’ have been nothing more than logos on a website, the actual value of the technologies working together is often nothing more than the fact it will work with a different vendor. 

Organisations are becoming more demanding for complete solutions that help them deliver their business outcomes, vendors that can cooperate and help to deliver these solutions will thrive.

As a true Value Added Distributor, Exclusive Networks not only has a wide portfolio of vendors, we also bring them together in a framework that allows our partners to gain a competitive advantage. This year we’ve launched joint Eco-system plays with a number of our key vendors including a highly successful ‘Defence in Formation’ play with Nutanix & Palo Alto Networks, focusing on next generation security in Hybrid Cloud environments.

5)   Increasing Pace Of Organisations Moving To XaaS

2021 will see an continued surge in organisations looking to consume IT on an Everything as a Service (XaaS) basis. The sheer pace of technological evolution is driving an ever increasing skills gap and by consuming IT as a utility, it provides organisations the opportunity to take advantage of the benefits of new technology without having to make significant investments in upskilling existing staff.  

The impact of Covid-19 means that adopting new technologies and business models has been a necessity for many organisations, simply to allow them to survive in this ‘new normal’ and 2021 will drive continued advances in this space.

Here at Exclusive Networks, we’ve invested heavily into this area to help our partners take advantage of this market trend. We launched our Digital Subscription platform, Exclusive on Demand, X-OD, earlier this year and are now live in 9 countries. Our vendors can transform their entire portfolio into a consumption based offering through the X-OD platform. For our partners, this provides them with the ability to move towards becoming an MSP, without the massive up-front costs and with the ability for them to create consumption based offerings with their own services, as well as 3rd party offerings, X-OD provides them with a unique platform to deliver Everything as a Service to their customers. 

6)   Stratospheric Edge Computing Growth

In 2021, we’ll continue to see the stratospheric growth in edge computing. Bringing computing services closer to the service consumers or the data source has never been more important. Edge computing helps organisations to address the challenges around bandwidth, latency and data sovereignty and as the world adapts to an ever more dispersed and mobile workforce, edge computing will become ever more important for organisations to adopt to meet the needs of their workforce and customers. 

This continued growth of edge computing will drive a significant level of opportunity for our vendors and our partners. To successfully execute on an edge computing strategy, organisations need amongst other things to have a modern network infrastructure, clear policies on what data gets stored centrally and what gets stored at the edge, an ability to manage bandwidth and latency as well as having a highly robust cyber security policy to protect a much wider attack surface.

With our portfolio here at Exclusive Networks, we have best in class solutions to help our partners to drive an edge computing strategy out into the market. From our networking portfolio including Arista, through to SD-WAN offerings from Silverpeak, Fortinet and Palo Alto, coupled with our position as the acknowledged distribution leaders in the cyber security space, we have the portfolio and the skills to accelerate the journey to the edge.

Summary 

We’re going to see continued macro level disruption across the globe due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Whilst vaccines are very much on the horizon, medical experts are warning that we’re likely to see continued lockdowns until such time as the vaccine has been widely distributed across the population. Technology will be a key driver in delivering the innovation required for organisations to adapt and thrive in these challenging times.

As an organisation, at Exclusive Networks we’ve always been a progressive, forward thinking company, disrupting the market with new technologies and in 2021 this approach will be even more important than it’s ever been before.