We have collected six necessary, experimental, and threatening trends most likely to impact SMBs during 2019.
SD-WAN: Software-defined wide area networking is more flexible, provides better performance and bandwidth, and allows remote locations to connect to internal networks. It uses public internet with an added layer of end-to-end encryption, and is expected to grow in the coming years with the rollout of 5G networks.
Multi-cloud management: It’s increasingly common to find more than one cloud service used in a single enterprise-level business, which can make managing data and software tricky. Luckily there’s an emerging market of multi-cloud management platforms that integrate services like AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure under one control console.
Multi-cloud management can lower costs, eliminate vendor lock-in, and improve performance. If your organization uses more than one cloud platform, consider adopting a multi-cloud strategy that includes a multi-cloud management platform.
Stateless hyperconverged infrastructure: Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) has eliminated many bottlenecks in computing, but it comes with a major drawback: Each node exists in an independent state, meaning it’s storing its own unique set of data. Stateless HCI utilizes a shared data server so that no node is in possession of unique data. If it fails another node simply picks up where it left off.
If your organization uses HCI, take a look at new stateless platforms—they can make HCI cheaper and more reliable than ever before.
HTTP/3: The Google-developed HTTP-over-QUIC has been renamed HTTP/3, and promises to shorten connection establishment times, reduce bandwidth congestion, and improve latency when it is rolled out in 2019.
It may also make traffic more secure, as QUIC can connect to a server and encrypt a request in a single transmission.
Nanosegmentation: This emerging new security technology is being developed to solve security issues that have arisen in the way microsegmented apps communicate with each other. Nanosegmentation maps internal communications between microservices and creates a whitelist of what’s allowed. Anything outside of its map is automatically rejected.
Data lineage: This practice involves recording the origin, movement, and modification of sensitive data. It’s already commonly used in the healthcare industry, and the EU’s new GDPR requires it.
Adopting a data lineage practice can help improve data quality as well—having major changes time stamped and logged can help analysts understand more about changes in a dataset over time, which can be beneficial in any industry.