2023 Predictions Summary

In this episode of 2023 Predictions, Sathya Sankaran, General Manager of CloudCasa by Catalogic, speaks with Swapnil Bhartiya on his insights into where he sees the industry heading in 2023. The pandemic resulted in the acceleration of cloud adoption and digital transformation and Sathya expects this momentum to continue in 2023 as well. Cloud-native technologies and digital transformation are going to be key for the many organizations that are looking at innovative ways to grow faster or reduce costs. Furthermore, the need for resiliency is going to be more important than ever, particularly in light of the increase in security risks. Let us look at the 5 predictions for 2023 by Sathya in detail.

1. No slowdown in digital transformation – Markets not withstanding. While the pandemic drove a lot of digital transformation initiatives, this momentum will continue throughout 2023, and Kubernetes adoption will likewise continue to be full steam ahead because there is a lot of cost pressures. If 2023 proves to be a financial crisis year for markets, organizations will lean on technology to deal with the crisis. Sathya believes that there is not going to be any slowdown in digital transformation, irrespective of what happens to the markets this year.
2. Backups are the new borders for organization. With cybercrimes on the rise in IT industry, organizations that have any data of importance, are a target for being attacked, irrespective of their nationality or industry. Often the last line of defense is your data backups. If ransomware and malware attacks are able to find and encrypt or remove backups, organizations remain extra vulnerable since they have no data recovery option. That’s why it is important to treat backups not just as secondary data but as the border that you defend that will keep you sleeping at night and protected out all times.
3. Machine learning is not learning for machines. There will be significant AI/ML advancements over the coming year to the point where it will become ubiquitous. Tools like ChatGPT are helping people solve challenges by quickly answering questions across various topics. But it’s equally important to ensure that you have a resilient architecture and infrastructure whenever you are utilizing AI. This is because one has to be able to trace back and solve problems when something goes wrong.
4. Operations in Kubernetes will get more complex before they get easier. Kubernetes operations will get more complex in 2023. Although there is an influx of vendors to fill gaps in the ecosystem, it is difficult to choose between all the options. That’s why curation of these options is in itself valuable in this ecosystem. The sheer number of commercial solutions is making things more complex for everyone, in terms of purely selecting the right solutions and putting them in place. Kubernetes operations are going to get more complex before they will eventually become very simple and more accessible to more of the tech community.
5. KubeVirt will emerge as a threat to VMware and Nutanix together. KubeVirt is an open-source project that essentially allows you to run virtualization workloads inside Kubernetes. A lot of people today run Kubernetes on VMs, but now think of the opposite scenario where you run VMs on Kubernetes. The acquisition of VMware by Broadcom has led to some uncertainty around it, and there are similar acquisition uncertainties for Nutanix as well. This can be a huge boon for the KubeVirt ecosystem, which allows users to create a lot of hyper converged offerings where virtual machines as well as containers can be operated and orchestrated through a single platform. 2023 could be the year of KubeVirt adoption as a mainstream virtualization and orchestration platform.

Focus for CloudCasa in 2023

Sathya shared CloudCasa’s focus for 2023, which will be going all in on the cloud native and Kubernetes ecosystems. The acceleration of cloud technologies as people focus on digital transformation is key for CloudCasa given it is a backup service that was built for cloud native workloads orchestrated by Kubernetes. CloudCasa also provides a resilient service to recover from incidents so that organizations’ operations can continue. With more organizations beginning to adopt modern, cutting edge solutions, CloudCasa will keep up with the speed at which ecosystem is evolving.

Challenges for CloudCasa as a Commercial Vendor

Back in the day, companies made decisions based on brand value, unlike now when the market is embracing open-source technologies that are well adopted by many companies. Sathya discusses some of the challenges that CloudCasa seeks to solve in 2023:

• How to build on open-source technology like Velero and contribute to it and solve real customer challenges, while embracing that ecosystem going forward.
• And how to solve problems around the edge cases that the community doesn’t solve for a minority of the users in this ecosystem?

Predictions Video with Swapnil and Sathya