Data Outlook 2022: Will the cloud get easier? Will streaming get off its island? Will data mesh see the light of day?

In some ways it seems like Groundhog Day. If last year we wrote that 2020 was the year we preferred to forget, 2021 was the year we were glad to survive. It’s not surprising that in these years of displacement that adoption of the cloud continued to climb. While a trailing indicator now, the latest Flexera state of the cloud report published early last year showed the proportion of enterprises spending more than seven figures per month doubling over the previous year.

The cloud offers the promise of operational simplification: it puts together on a single control plane the ability to deploy, configure, manage, and secure compute infrastructure. And when you implemented a managed service, the legwork of provisioning and software maintenance is lifted from your shoulders. But when it comes to delivering solutions, the offerings are piecemeal. AWS’s portfolio exceeds 250 services, and the situation is not much better with the other major clouds. Google cloud, for instance, offers a dozen analytics services and 10 container services, while Azure offers roughly a dozen apiece of DevOps, hybrid cloud, and IoT services. The burden of integration is on the customer’s shoulders.

While cloud providers are not about to stop offering new services, in the coming year, we expect to see them hunt for synergies across their portfolio where they can pre-integrate related offerings. One area of promise is with streaming (data in motion) and operational and analytic databases (data at rest). It’s long been a dream to unify streaming and data platforms, and we’re already seeing hints that some convergence might be starting to happen. There would be clear benefits in areas as diverse as Customer engagement, supply chain optimization, capital markets, MRO (maintenance, repair, and overhaul), among others, and converged streaming could provide real-time feedback loops for machine learning models.

We also expect that in 2022, data mesh will receive its first real scrutiny. While the published body of work has been largely complimentary until now, we got a hint of latent backlash in the response to our post a couple months back on data meshes. We received plenty of feedback about fears that data meshes will create or reinforce data silos that already exist across most enterprises. That’s actually a reflection that the idea is being taken seriously, and that there's a reason why we’ll be having the data mesh conversation in 2022.

As always, we air our thoughts in full on ZDnet. For our outlook on the cloud, streaming, and data platforms, click here.

For our take on the forthcoming dialog on data meshes, click here.