Tech Insight: Nathan Steiner, Veeam Software
What’s the next big disruptive play in the technology sectors and what impact will it have?
The next big disruptive play will be the proliferation of mass IoT, the subsequent explosion of data and the ability to analyse and leverage it. Organisational data will be the main source of competitive advantage and the IoT will move delivery of services into real time with the need to be always-on and available. This will have profound impact on the infrastructure underpinning such services. The cloud, virtualisation, containers — the step from physical server to virtualisation — was one thing, but today, businesses have many more options. They need to ask themselves where to deploy, and this will become one of the most important decisions.
What innovative technologies do you see emerging in your solution categories in 2017, and how will they help your customers?
2017 will see organisations focus more on hybrid cloud models as a way of delivering their applications, data and resources as a set of services to their customers, both internal and external. The last three years have seen significant drive and ideology in the marketplace towards a ‘don’t own stuff’ mentality, thereby driving towards an all-in approach towards public cloud. Organisations across many market segments have differing regulatory, compliance and service delivery requirements and have realised that the hybrid cloud approach provides the most commercial, strategic and business sense. This will profoundly benefit Veeam customers as our technology and solution strategy is built on providing an availability platform that is hybrid cloud centric. An ability to provide enterprise continuity, workload mobility, visibility and compliance across private, managed and public clouds collectively.
We believe that 2017 will be a good year for enterprises to stop the rat race and focus on a long-term strategy (3–5 years) and start working towards that. That will, of course, require new and innovative technologies.
Is the ICT regulatory and legal environment getting easier or harder, clearer or murkier for your business and your clients’ businesses and why?
There are two seismic changes impacting the ICT regulatory and legal environment. Mobility and IoT are driving the requirement for accessibility of services to unprecedented levels. Data and its access is the second seismic impact. Data is getting pushed and delivered closer to the consumer edge, which makes the security, protection, management and access of such data more complex and harder to manage. Such disruption is challenging our existing regulatory and legal frameworks across all market segments. Managing both the ‘risk’ and ‘cost’ complexities in alignment with regulatory and legal requirements is one of the few challenges not tackled head-on by organisations as part of digital transformation.
The outlook is definitely more questions than answers. A good example would be government policies — on data protection policies, privacy policies, ‘the right to be forgotten’.
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