A Forecast of Cloud Trends for 2021

What trends are circling around the cloud? iManage General Manager for Cloud Services, Dan Dosen, forecasts three things that are coming to the forefront in 2021:

• GraphQL Will Usher in Digital Transformation 2.0. REST APIs have had a good run. But there’s growing interest in GraphQL as a new way for customers to interact with data in the cloud and integrate with cloud technologies. For good reason: GraphQL is going to facilitate integration at a level that previously would’ve been much more complex to undertake. This is going to make integrations a much more streamlined and straightforward process, creating richer integrations that will ultimately serve the end user. In this way, digital transformation becomes an easier undertaking for organisations to get started with and fully embrace. One more hurdle towards making full use of the cloud has been significantly lowered, allowing more organisations to make a giant leap forward.
• RPO and RTO Are Becoming Obsolete. Disaster recovery has long focused on the recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) – but that’s an old-fashioned approach. A more modern approach is to design for high availability. Here’s what that looks like: Rather than having a single building in one location, and another building 300 miles away that you fail over to over the course of several hours, you might have three buildings in a location – each with its own power, network, heating, and cooling – that are virtualised and serve as a cluster of availability zones. The old-school way of failing over to a datacenter hundreds of miles away is increasingly going to go by the wayside in favour of an approach that drives higher uptime and availability – so that you don’t even have to worry about RPO and RTO.
• Zero Trust Made Inroads in 2020. Zero Touch Will Do the Same in 2021. Not all clouds are created equal: One built on the zero trust security framework is essential to providing the highest level of protection for critical assets. Zero trust only works, however, if zero touch is at the center of it. This mean ensuring that nobody – not even a small number of trusted resources, as most cloud vendors allow for – is allowed access to the customer data. New forms of automation help remove the human from the equation so that there is no way to access this sensitive customer data, creating a “hands free” environment. Increasingly savvy customers in 2021 will not accept a “zero trust” claim from cloud vendors unless they can verify that they’ve made “zero touch” a central pillar of their approach to securing cloud data.