You wake up today, and it’s the year 2025. This might seem like a long way away – but in data years, it is just around the corner. Let's see what happened along the way.

According to ‘Business 2 Community’, here are some predictions we should be seeing:

By 2020

• 90% of the enterprises will generate some revenue from Data as a Service.
  Organizations are collecting an increasing amount of data and some of this data has value outside the organization.

By 2021

• 66% of analytics processes will not only tell you what happened but prescribe what should be done.
  Analytics used to be the tool to see what happened - the proverbial rear-view mirror of business. With advanced analytics and machine learning, organizations will be able to have that data provide suggestions and scenarios for what should be done.
• More than 50% of business systems will incorporate continuous intelligence.

By 2022

• Today most data processing is batch processing. They might be small batches, and they might happen often, but it is not continuous intelligence. Increasingly data platforms of the future will use streaming technologies and get real-time updates. Using the prescriptive analytics of 2021 just became continuous and real-time.

By 2023

• 20% of IT specialists will be reduced due to AI automated data management.
  How many people remember hearing that with the personal computer, everyone will have more free time? How is that working out? While new technologies and efficiencies of technology will change the nature of the entire workforce, it remains to be seen if this is a reduction or redeployment of a skill set.

By 2024

• Oddly the article cited, makes no predictions for 2024.
  I will predict that if the 2023 prediction is really true, then the reason nothing happens in 2024 is because we reduced the IT specialists by 20% in 2023

By 2025

• 49% of the world's stored data resides in cloud environments.
• 175 Zettabytes (1 ZB = 1 billion terabytes )will be generated, up from 40 ZB in 2019.
• 60% of the 175 ZB will be created and managed by enterprise organizations.
  The realization from that timeline is that the volume and speed of data is only increasing and therefore organizations have to start today to plan for how to handle this in the very near future.

How can an organization start to prepare for this? The one key takeaway is this: cloud-based, serverless capabilities to prepare your enterprise for 2025.

Using today’s technology for tomorrow

Today most organizations are using some cloud services. Many have taken the first step to ‘lift and shift’ their workloads from on-premise solutions to running on virtual machines and in some cases in containers.

Moving an enterprise’s compute to the cloud is a great step in the right direction. However this alone is not enough to address the increase in both data and compute needs of the near future.

Enterprise organizations adopting a microservice, container orchestration approach are stilling using a ‘serverfull’ strategy. This strategy, while allowing for better scaling than on-premise solution, still requires the enterprise organization to manage and provision the servers and worry about how to scale to react to increased traffic. Additionally organizations will need to know how to spin down capacity when the traffic decreases to help manage costs. It is the ebb and flow of compute resources, the ever increasing amount of data and the on going concern for security updates that make a serverless approach an appealing strategy.

Why Serverless

A great number of people’s initial reaction will be to leverage the serverless cloud capabilities to reduce cost. But the real reason enterprise organizations should consider serverless cloud computing is for increased:

• Business Agility
• Scalability, High Availability and Fault Tolerance of Business Services
• Security

Most IT organizations talk about having a robust Continuous integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline to make sure applications and data are continuously production ready. Organizations need to start to include Continuous Agility, Continuous Resilience, Continuous Security (CA/CR/CS) pipeline as well.

Leon C. Megginson, Professor of Management and Marketing at Louisiana State University, in 1963 is quoted as saying: “It is not the strongest of the specifies that survives, not the most intelligent, but the one most adaptable to change.”

What is Serverless

Serverless computing has the following attributes:

• Incurs cost only when the service is being used
• No servers or clusters to provision. Scaling, High Availability, Fault Tolerance is handled by the cloud provider.
• No server operating system patches or maintenance. Security patches, upgrades and hardware failures are handled by the cloud provider.

Serverless Shift

For organizations of any size, using serverless cloud-based computing allows you to focus on providing business solutions without the friction of provisioning and procuring the computing power to do so. Organizations can select the best cloud-based solutions for the business problem, use as much of the service as is required, and scale that to meet the demands of the business.

Continuous Decision Making

I have read the following quote in some of the AWS documentation and I think it really crystalizes the thought:

“The speed at which data is available dictates the speed at which decisions can be made.”

Organizations need to use every opportunity to make new data actionable in a continuous manner, and the least cost all while allowing for the maximum flexibility to adjust to a changing business landscape. Leveraging cloud-based, serverless computing services will provide that capability and prepare your organization for 2025.