AECCafe Industry Predictions for 2024 – PEER Software

By Jimmy Tam, CEO, Peer Software

Jimmy Tam

Globalization of talent, post-COVID remote/back-to-office work trends, and an accelerating pace of mergers and acquisitions is powering a “hybridization” of our business culture and technology.

This has led to the emergence of remote teams that are highly productive and can work on projects around the clock across multiple time zones leading to faster project completion and improved time-to-market potential. But how can you best support these teams to maximize their performance?

Modern Distributed File Systems Emerge to Fuel Productivity

In 2024, the evolution of file sharing and collaboration tools for designers and engineers plays a leading role in enhancing team productivity and will be influenced by various factors including technological breakthroughs, market demands, and industry-specific needs.

This is where modern distributed file systems come into the picture to provide an optimal architecture for file sharing and collaboration productivity. In a distributed file system, files are stored across multiple servers or nodes that are geographically distributed and close to remote project teams. Each team member can access a local copy of the files, regardless of their location, resulting in faster file access and reduced latency. When changes are being made to a file by one end-user, other users are prevented from making an edit at the same time to prevent version conflicts. Committed file changes are then synchronized across all the nodes in real-time, ensuring that all team members have the latest version of the file. This eliminates version control issues, as the distributed file system becomes the single source of truth for all project files, and all changes are tracked and recorded.

For most organizations, a modern distributed file system can seamlessly integrate with existing storage systems and with cloud storage as needed to provide a flexible, cost effective, and efficient solution to meet the challenges of today’s globally distributed teams. In addition to modern distributed file systems, additional trends in 2024 where distributed data architectures will shine include:

Active-Passive High Availability Practices Evolve to Active-Active

Without continuous availability and real-time access to data, businesses imperil brand reputation, are making decisions with potentially inaccurate information, risk losing out to competitors, and more. So, it is no wonder that CIOs are starting to demand more from their data centers. In the coming 12 months, it is likely that many IT leaders will start to adopt active-active capabilities, improving performance by distributing data workloads across several nodes to allow access to the resources of all servers.

By moving away from dated active-passive technologies that simply don’t make the most of the available servers and often require manual intervention during outages, CIOs will ensure that data is actionable wherever it resides, is as close as possible to the end-user for performance, and that the load of data processing is spread across all compute and storage nodes whether it be at the edge, in the data center, or in the cloud.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure is Here to Stay – but Will Trend off the Cloud

Even in the AEC space, VDI was the reason many of us could continue to work when the pandemic hit in 2020. It offered users a flexible, consistent experience from wherever they logged in and became a lynchpin for organizations during the days of lockdown. But there was an issue: the hardware was difficult to get hold of. And the urgency we all became so used to during the pandemic meant there was no time to wait for the supply chain to right itself, so CIOs turned to the cloud.

The cloud has clear benefits; easy to implement, and it is elastic in nature, quickly responding to and growing with your needs. But it can be very expensive and because cloud providers tend to charge for each transaction, costs can be difficult to predict.

Supply chain improvements and the movement back to our offices will bring about a shift towards migrating data intensive and highly transactional workloads back on-premises and to the edge. Watch for CFOs to start pressing CIOs to explain the cost differences.

The Storage Industry Will Start to Productize AI and ML

Of course, we need to mention AI and Machine Learning (ML) as it has so much promise along with the hype, but they’re not being adopted as quickly as anticipated. There’s a clear reason why: users simply don’t know how to realize the technologies’ full potential. Beyond ChatGPT, which is easy to use and incredibly popular, there’s no real out-of-the-box product for enterprise storage customers. So, unless organizations have a data scientist on hand to help them navigate the intricacies of AI and ML, they’re very likely to hold off when it comes to implementing any kind of solution.

Through 2024, we’ll see the beginning of the productization of AI and ML. Ready-to-use packages will be developed so that users can easily understand what the technologies can help them achieve, while being straightforward to set up and run. Then watch, as AI and ML adoption increases.

About Author:

Jimmy Tam is the CEO of Peer Software, a global software company focused on simplifying file management and orchestration for enterprise organizations since 1993. Jimmy is a 25-year veteran of enterprise software solutions and works with customers and partners daily on architecture, planning, and design of IT infrastructure solutions that meet the complex demands of data storage, access, protection, and sharing across distributed employees, partner firms, and customers.

Category: Industry Predictions

This entry was posted on Friday, January 12th, 2024 at 10:47 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.