Similar to the General Data Protection Regulation, the Personal Data Protection Bill has the power to influence the current operating model for many service providers and requires new offerings that meet the specifications of the act. This will create a competitive opportunity for providers to differentiate their services. Businesses will need to implement new requirements into their vendor selection process and prepare for the costs that come with implementing and monitoring compliance.

Edge computing continues to be a critical need for various industries, such as the energy and travel industries. As well, most offices need some small amount of local support in terms of firewalls or local data storage. Compact data centers or converged edge systems are a good answer to these needs in a small, selfcontained unit that avoids the cost of grooming local space for individual data center needs (fire suppression, security, cooling). These edge devices are also critical to global IoT deployments, with the edge collecting individual data streams for aggregation to a global data center.

Technology is helping to drive data center security by creating enhanced capabilities and solutions. Security threats to data centers can result in downtime or significant business disruption. Security teams can leverage new technologies to identify threats and automatically start their incident response, in some cases completely automating recovery procedures or delegating the review and response to system administrators. Overall, technology enables faster response times for teams that implement automated solutions. Automation is no silver bullet, though, teams must continue to monitor, enhance and test playbooks, and avoid complacency.

Multiple technologies have made DR easier to achieve than ever. VMWare vMotion and the similar technologies across all of the virtualized server providers have made rapid movement across a server infrastructure easy to configure and seamless in operation. Combined with cloud capabilities providing Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas), achieving a geographically distributed multi-server infrastructure is also less expensive. Cloud also provides storage for multi-tier backups with a large variety of hot to cold options, also making it easier to acquire and implement storage for backups or hot redundancy.

Two big areas I see AI having an impact is monitoring / alerting and Robotic Process Automation (RPA). In the monitoring / alerting space, AI continues to improve and provide an offset to internal staff by improving the accuracy of alerting. In all types of monitoring, such as security event monitoring or operating system event logs, AI is having an impact in detecting and correlating critical events, reducing the need for staff to perform this work manually.

RPA is about automating tasks with the help of an AI agent. Automating tasks has long been a scripted job, with a developer or infrastructure technician writing automation for specific needs and coding for all of the alternatives in that automation. Combined with AI, RPA now reduces the amount of scripting and self-learns over time how to deal with different variations. A good example is IT help desk ticket resolution. Previously, someone on staff manually distributed tickets or simple rules regarding the task requested determined where the ticket was assigned. Now combined with RPA, a help desk system can observe the pattern of ticket resolution and predictively assign the ticket to the right person, reducing the staff needed to manage ticket flow and deal with incorrectly assigned tickets.