Guest: Sergey Kandaurov (LinkedIn, Twitter)
Companies: Flexify.IO (Twitter)
Show: 2022 Prediction Series

With organizations migrating more of their data to the cloud, they may find themselves locked in with a single vendor or solution. Sergey Kandaurov, founder and CTO of Flexify.IO, joins us on our 2022 Prediction Series to talk about the trap of cloud lock-in. He predicts: “This problem will get much more recognition and companies will realize that cloud lock-in is evil and will start fighting it at all costs.” He also says that the industry will see the data explosion, not anything like it has seen so far. “And companies will benefit not only from storing this data, they’ll benefit from analyzing those large amounts of data. And of course, it will create more demand for cloud storage and for analytical tools,” Kandaurov adds. Check out his video above to know more.

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Swapnil Bhartiya: Hi, this is Swapnil Bhartiya and welcome to our 2022 prediction series. And we have with us once again, Sergey Kandaurov, founder and CTO of Flexify.IO. Sergey, it’s good to have you back on the show.

Sergey Kandaurov: Hi. Hello, and thank you for having me again.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Before I ask you to share the predictions, please quickly tell us what the company is all about?

Sergey Kandaurov: Sure. Flexify is all about multi-cloud storage. We do cloud-to-cloud migration, cloud native speeds focused on large amounts of data like petabytes and billions of objects. And we also do multi-cloud storage in terms of being able to split or replicate data between multiple clouds, which is virtualized into a single virtual layer with a unified namespace.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Excellent. Now it’s time for you to pick up your crystal ball and share with us what predictions you have for next year.

Sergey Kandaurov: We believe that companies will understand and avoid cloud lock-in. The thing is that when you choose the cloud in the beginning of a cloud journey, in many cases, you end up being locked into that cloud. This problem will get much more recognition and companies will realize that cloud lock-in is evil and will start fighting it at all costs.

Second, we will see the data explosion, not anything like we have seen before. It is said many times that during the last decade, the amount of data that is over there, the amount of data stored on cloud servers, it grew, it basically added many zeros. What we see now, what we see in 2021, that the rate of this data growth will be enormous. And companies will benefit not only from storing this data, they’ll benefit from analyzing those large amounts of data. And of course, it will create more demand for cloud storage and for analytical tools.

Then we will see that cost optimization will finally become a thing for enterprise and for medium large businesses. In the beginning of the cloud journey, it basically fulfills its promise. Companies can bring products to markets quite fast. Companies can use proprietary services and basically take advantage of all those innovations. But once those products are in the wild, while they are out, while they are starting to pick up users, what those companies see is the cost. As I said, the amount of dollars, they need to pay to those cloud providers, it just skyrockets. And in many cases it goes out of control.

What we will see in 2021, is that companies start to understand this issue. It finally will become a sensible problem. And businesses will find ways to minimize the costs inclusion by going to a multi-cloud environment, and maybe switching between cloud providers. We will also see that organizations will have much more data to migrate than in the past.

We expect that the amount of data migrated between multiple clouds will also skyrocket. And the reason for that is first of all, that there are much more offers now on the markets than ever before. When you want to store data in the cloud Amazon series for several years, not only your choice, but now competitors are finally catching up and offering much better prices. And in many cases, much better support and much better performance. And we will see companies finally making this choice to fulfill one of the previous problems I mentioned here.

And we will also see that companies being stressed to find good talent. We will more and more rely on third party suppliers. Instead of doing some development in-house, companies will come to consultants and professionals and companies that are experts and that are called expertise in that specific area. And can do it much more efficiently and already have all talent and also technology to do things like migration of multi-cloud storage and basically, everything else.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Sergey, thank you for sharing these predictions. Now, if I ask you what is going to be the focus for the company in 2022, what would that be?

Sergey Kandaurov: In 2022, we will finally focus on growth. Up until now. We mostly focus on creating the technology that turns out to be amazing technology. We can do things that many of people who have lead us call magic. In 2021, we will finally see more traction, more companies wanted to migrate it between multiple clouds and employ multi-cloud strategy in storage as well. And we expect to increase our customer base few times and have very interesting and very large cases in very large scale migrations and multi-cloud storage.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Excellent. Sergey, thank you so much for taking time out today and sharing of course, about the company, the focus and predictions. I would love to have you back on the show next year again in December and hold a scorecard to see how many of your predictions turn out to be true. And also, to get the new set of predictions for 2023. But thanks for your time today. I really appreciate it.

Sergey Kandaurov: Thank you, Swapnil, very much. And I will be happy to join you in a year from now. And that is the most interesting part, to see what predictions come true.

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