Multi-Cloud: What to Expect in 2022

Eating 12 grapes. Hanging an onion outside your door. Throwing old plates. Eating Hoppin' John. People around the world certainly have some wild and wonderful ways of ringing in the new year.

Since the champagne bottles have all been recycled and the Times Square ticker-tape cleaned up, it's time for one of my favorite New Year's traditions - the annual technology predictions blog. To help get me started, I spoke with a number of VMware leaders to get their take on what to expect in the coming year. I wrote a detailed account of their answers in this blog post but thought I'd sum them up succinctly here. One thing upon which we all agree: the multi-cloud approach is here to stay.

Here are the highlights:

• Expect theemergence of a federated, cloud-agnostic data fabric to enable data portability. Most companies have already identified solutions for app portability. But to truly operationalize a multi-cloud architecture, we need to get data out of traditional storage systems and into the cloud.
• We will probably see a double-extortion ransomware attack against a Fortune 500 company using stolen credentials. Security is and will always be an ongoing cat and mouse game. Last year saw some noteworthy ransomware attacks (like Kaseya and Colonial Pipeline), but we expect bad actors to raise the stakes this year with an even more sophisticated approach. We also predict that our colleagues in the tech industry - partnering with academia, cybersecurity experts, and government agencies around the world - will unite to meet the challenge.
  
• The rise of the Kubernetes (K8s) API server will mark a shift from imperative DevSecOps practices to a manifest-based approach. Proven successful for containerized infrastructure, we expect that the K8s declarative management approach will facilitate solutions in machine learning, stream-based processing, app integration, and other areas.
• VPNs and password-based authentication will be replaced by biometrics and other new approaches as we seek better solutions for end users who work remotely. We expect micro-perimeters, real-time security-posture checks, and SASE offerings to begin to replace these older, less-secure infrastructures.
  
• Blockchain/digital-ledger technology will go mainstream. Already taking hold in the financial-services industry, we expect that 2022 will be the year that blockchain is adopted for other use cases (such as supply chain) - fundamentally changing the nature of doing business across organizational boundaries.
  

What do you think of the VMware leaders' predictions for 2022? Let me know in the comments and feel free to share your own predictions for the coming year.

Best,

Kit