Cloud Without Compromise

Chapter 7. Data Gravity

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected each of us in many different ways. But in the scope of business and IT, what specifically made 2020 (and most of 2021) so particularly challenging? A question that we routinely ask our clients is, “Who is leading your digital transformation?” Oftentimes, the answer has been “our CIO,” “our CFO,” and so on. But in 2020, more often than not the answer was “it’s COVID-19.” There have been massive impacts across employees, partners embedded within companies, and end-user digital experiences as a whole. Increasingly, everything needed to be available and accessible online. Companies accelerated their drive toward cloud, and their customers were pushing urgently for all-digital availability of services.

Our experience during this time as IBMers was an interesting one, to say the least. The nature of our work and the diversity of our client interactions meant that we had the broadest aperture possible to the range of ways businesses have been impacted by and have responded to the pandemic. We have observed businesses that have struggled, but likewise there have been clients that have flourished in the “new normal” (recall the thrivers, divers, and new arrivers we talked about in Chapter 1).

From the perspective of containerized storage (and IBM Storage in general), we’ve recognized three major trends:

Management and control

In the past, administrators would have procured more storage (in support of applications and users), as ...