5 web trends you need to know about in 2021

On December 14, 2020, a massive network outage caused Google's services for users in the United States to be interrupted or downtime. Services such as Google Calendar, Gmail, Google Workspace, Hangouts, and Google Classroom were interrupted or crashed, devices with integrated Google Assistant stopped working, and third-party applications such as Pokémon Go that used Google's backend services also encountered problems. This incident affected the work and life of people working and studying remotely at home.

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Network outages have once again demonstrated the importance of the network to people's daily work and life. With most organizations' employees still working remotely from home this year, network outages will become more frequent and more severe. In 2021, network trends will promote the agility and security of organizational businesses, and most importantly, the strategy of always being online.

1. Business leaders will adopt a software-first approach to deployment

In addition to paying for electricity, data center operating costs are its main management costs, usually the salaries of data center operations staff and the cost of purchasing software solutions. Organizations that adopt a hardware-first strategy are often limited in software choices, which can lead to higher operating costs. Going forward, organizations will focus on adopting software solutions that better suit their needs and then choose their hardware and the corresponding on-premises data center or colocation data center.

2. Private cloud adoption will grow rapidly

Many organizations are re-evaluating the costs and security risks associated with adopting public clouds. For some time, many organizations believed that the best cloud computing platforms were provided through public providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Although public clouds can help organizations avoid the cost and complexity of managing their own IT infrastructure, private clouds will become more attractive after security issues with public clouds, a stricter regulatory environment, and significantly lower costs for private clouds.

3. Remote work will drive more edge computing adoption

As organizations' employees work remotely from home and move users further away from centralized data centers, more and more organizations will seek to adopt edge computing solutions to better facilitate decentralized operations. A survey report released by research firm Gartner in 2018 showed that only about 10% of the data generated by organizations was created or processed outside of centralized data centers or cloud platforms. However, the company predicts that by 2025, this figure will reach 25%, and the coronavirus epidemic in 2020 has accelerated the implementation of digital transformation by more and more organizations, and this proportion will be higher. By moving data activities from centralized networks to locations closer to end users, organizations can improve the security, speed, connectivity and scalability of networks where employees work remotely.

4. Organizations will become more strategic in multiple cloud computing environments

Although adopting a single cloud computing environment may seem like the simplest option, it is not the most strategic. More and more organizations are adopting hybrid clouds, which can provide the advantages of on-premises data centers and public clouds to achieve tighter security and control over certain data, as well as provide scalability as needed. Similarly, organizations will adopt multiple public clouds depending on the use case. The solution will vary from organization to organization as business leaders approach each decision more strategically based on their unique needs.

5. Data centers will become more automated

More and more organizations will leverage data center automation and intent-based networking (IBN) to automate the design, build, deployment, and operation of their networks. This will eliminate the heavy lifting that IT teams handle on a daily basis, so they can focus on more strategic work. Similar to how Uber and Lyft automate the entire ride-sharing process, organizations will use intent-based networking (IBN) to free up human capital, rather than relying on manual work to book rides, provide navigation for drivers, plan routes to destinations, pay fees, and constantly solve operational challenges.

While organizations still have a lot of work to do to strengthen their networks and take a more strategic approach to cloud computing, it’s important to recognize the progress that has been made over the past few decades.