Uila 2022 Predictions

 Technology is undergoing a radical transformation of development, just like most of our society in today’s pandemic (how much we wish we could call it post-pandemic) impacted world. As we head into 2022, here are some of the predictions to ponder upon, that I feel will be gaining momentum and be on top of mind.

 Cyber Security Risks grow at alarming pace

Ransomware will continue to be in the limelight for exploits against a variety of enterprise organizations. This year we saw vaccine manufacturers, banks, hospitals, government agencies falling victim to these exploits, and this is expected to get worse in 2022, with more organizations falling victim to these attacks. And add to it, is the log4j vulnerability impacting almost 50% of systems worldwide and leaving every vendor and IT team scrambling to get multiple updates for their systems and solutions in a matter of days. Also, as remote working will continue into 2022, you can even expect more attacks being introduced to compromise home office computers that in many cases typically unpatched and may not have the highest security mechanisms implemented.

Organizations may not be able to prevent all attacks or stop all threats, but figuring out a way to prevent from the threat or vulnerability proliferating to the entire deployment should be the realistic goal for every security and infrastructure professional. Most threats will be in some sort of stealth mode, with the goal to compromise as many assets as they can, by moving laterally within the deployment. Being able to identify the east-west direction network traffic and attack movement in a timely manner and taking remediation actions automatically to prevent that further penetration into the network will be the top priority for all IT teams.

Rush-to-cloud trend needs efficient monitoring to avoid costly rollbacks

The next trend is around the sudden “rush-to-cloud-everything”. In today’s hybrid workforce situation, cloud offers the much-needed system resources and makes economic sense in most cases. But this rush due to management or peer pressure, may lead IT organizations to cut corners (knowingly or unknowingly), as they plan their migration projects. Poor planning without knowing existing resource usage, existing assets, their dependencies lead to costly rollouts and even more expensive roll-backs. It is recommended that migration teams get full visibility into the dependencies between every asset before the migration, as well as validate the dependency during the migration process, especially if the dependencies are spanning cloud boundaries.

Also, faster migration, may lead to compromises on the security side as workloads are moved to the cloud. So, implementing multiple layers of security will be key to protect confidential corporate data.

Hybrid workforce to fuel VDI growth

The other trend like 2021, that will remain strong is the growth for VDI. With more than 50% employees expected to work remotely, VDI is the gamechanger for organizations that need to operate at scale and enjoy great cost savings. But VDI still brings a lot of challenges for the IT organization. This can range from slow access to the applications or even the login process. Desktop teams also now must isolate issues between the centralized server in the Data Center and the user’s home network. But I predict some stressful conversations convincing them that they need to upgrade their home internet speeds. Also, with IT teams also working from home, automated remediation of any policy violation, without any manual intervention is important.

 In summary, 2022 will be as challenging as 2021, but will offer us an opportunity to improve our standard of living with flexible work models and improve our operational agility as we unleash new technologies to protect critical data and improve performance.