Guest: Cassius Rhue (LinkedIn)
Company: SIOS Technology (Twitter)
Show: 2022 Prediction Series

With the majority of organizations making multi-cloud a strategic priority worldwide, Cassius Rhue, VP of customer experience at SIOS Technology, predicts an increase in the usage of multi-cloud in 2022. “I believe that’s going to be driven both by the advances in technology specialization that we find in one cloud versus another for a particular workload, but it’s also being driven heavily by companies acquiring other companies and technologies as they continue to build out their stack,” adds Rhue. He also expects to see more companies investing in professional services.

Rhue also shares his 2022 prediction about disaster recovery. “I think with the growing number of disasters and how widespread they are, how they are affecting every part of the country and the world, you’ll see companies begin to invest more heavily in their disaster recovery strategy. That will include investing in technologies that allow them to recover data faster, create zero data lost copies and clones,” quips Rhue. Check out the above video to know what else Rhue is predicting for the year ahead.

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Swapnil Bhartiya: Hi, this is your host and welcome to our 2022 Predictions Series. Today we have with us, once again, Cassius Rhue, VP of customer experience at SIOS Technology. Cassius, it’s great to have you back on the show.

Cassius Rhue: Great to be here, been a long time. Good to be able to talk with you again about SIOS and about predictions for the coming year.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Before we go into predictions, please quickly remind our reviewers. What is SIOS technology all about?

Cassius Rhue: Yeah, so SIOS technology is a high availability and disaster recovery company. We specialize in making applications available, highly available, keeping your critical enterprise running and disaster recovery, so handling situations where you have server outages or data center outages.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Excellent. Now it’s time for you to grab your crystal ball and tell us what predictions you have.

Cassius Rhue: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. A couple of predictions for the coming year. First prediction is that we’ll see an increase in the usage of multi-cloud. I believe that’s going to be driven both by the advances in technology specialization that we find in one cloud versus another for a particular workload, but it’s also being driven heavily by companies acquiring other companies and technologies as they continue to build out their stack. So one IT team may have been using Azure, another IT team using Google cloud, and then another company having AWS as their backbone. And then through acquisitions or through the need for specialized technology, that one cloud offers versus the other, you’ll begin to see more and more of that multi-cloud infrastructure.

I expect to see more companies investing in professional services. By professional services, I mean companies investing in other teams, consultants, experts, cloud evangelists, cloud architects, solution architects that specialize in a particular field or a particular technology. As you continue to see this growth in cloud, and as we see companies acquiring other companies where they’re using a different cloud technology, or you have stacks within the company where it’s a Microsoft stack, so obviously it lends itself really well to being on Azure. But then you have other technology stacks that have been running either legacy or running an AWS, or there’s a preference for using Google cloud, because of that, having those skill sets, someone that’s an expert in AWS, someone that’s an expert in Azure and Microsoft, maybe even a Microsoft MVP, someone that’s a Google cloud expert or a data scientist. Having all of that expertise on staff is something that I think few companies have that luxury for, especially when they’re doing a lot of acquisitions.

You’ll see them start to reach out to fill those gaps with professional services. You’ll also start to see them reach out to other companies for professional services to help them onboard into a different cloud. Maybe in 2020-2021, you began to see the need to go to the cloud, but you don’t have that skill set. PS or professional services will help you bridge that gap and get to the cloud sooner.

The third prediction, if I’m pulling out my crystal ball and predicting what 2022 will hold in store for us, I want to first acknowledge and send sympathies and concerns to those who have been affected by a lot of the natural disasters around the world. There have been recent disasters in the US that have affected the lives of many. Unfortunately predictions are telling us that these types of disasters will continue to occur and will increase in frequency.

That leads me to my 2022 prediction about disaster recovery. I think with the growing number of disasters and how widespread they are, how they are affecting every part of the country and the world, you’ll see companies begin to invest more heavily in their disaster recovery strategy. That will include investing in technologies that allow them to recover data faster, create zero data lost copies and clones. I think we’ll also begin to see these companies investing in different data centers, so broadening where they keep their data. Not only employing high availability in the same region, but also going region to region with disaster recovery and automated failover and adding technologies like that to supplement what they’re doing so that they are more insulated against some of these disasters that are occurring at a much more frequent pace.

And the final conclusion that we have for 2022. As we know that containers are becoming a big part of infrastructure and technology, we expect that in 2022, you’ll see marginal gain in containers with complex infrastructures, and it will continue to grow and thrive in DevOps and in smaller infrastructure pods. But the use of container technology and large enterprise workloads will be delayed as the complexity for implementing those containers and the complexity in breaking out some of the more monolithic workloads that exist to in today’s data center will take time, a lot more time. There will be some companies that are more interested in getting to the cloud with that monolithic infrastructure, and that will delay them migrating these complex infrastructures to containers in 2022.

Those are our predictions for 2022 from SIOS Technology, where we specialize in high availability and disaster recovery and making sure that critical enterprise applications are available when customers and companies need it.

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

Cassius Rhue: Yeah, SIOS Technology, our core technology is around high availability and disaster recovery. In 2022, we are going to be working on bringing more value to high availability, making it easier for companies that are investing in disaster recovery technologies to be able to get that value, to be able to get their infrastructure up in all of the different environments, on premise, virtualized, cloud, hybrid cloud, and even multi-cloud. Our products will be bringing more value to end customers and increasing uptime as we all battle against those things that cause us to lose sleep.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Excellent. Cassius, thank you so much for sharing these predictions, sharing your insights. [inaudible 00:07:01] I would love to have you back on the show next year to hold a scorecard and see how many of your predictions turn out to be true and then get next set of predictions for the next year. But I really appreciate your time today. Thank you.

Cassius Rhue: Absolutely. Pleasure talking with you and look forward to talking to you in the new year. Best of luck and best wishes.

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