Guest: Sathya Sankaran (LinkedIn,)
Company: CloudCasa by Catalogic (Twitter)

We are back with our super popular Prediction Series, which captures insights from industry experts into the trends, challenges and opportunities they see in 2023. We are packaging these insights as ‘Predictions’, but these interviews are much more than just ‘Predictions’. 

In this episode of 2023 Predictions, Sathya Sankaran, General Manager of CloudCasa by Catalogic, joins me to share his insights into where he sees the industry heading towards in 2023. The pandemic resulted in the acceleration of digital transformation and CloudCasa expects this momentum to continue in 2023 as well. Cloud-native technologies and digital transformation are going to be key for the many organizations that are looking at innovative ways to grow faster or reduce costs. Furthermore, the need for resiliency is going to be more important than ever, particularly in light of the increase in security risks. He discusses how tools like ChatGPT are helping people solve challenges but to ensure you have a resilient architecture and infrastructure whenever you are utilizing AI since you have to be able to trace back and solve problems when something goes wrong.

Key highlights of this video interview are:

• CloudCasa is a Kubernetes dedicated backup-as-a-service. While the company has historically been a product company, it is challenging itself to deliver this as a service to simplify backups, disaster recovery, cloud migrations, and cloud portability for customers enabling them to protect and recover workloads. 
• While the pandemic drove a lot of digital transformation, Sankaran believes that this momentum will continue throughout 2023 and that Kubernetes adoption will likewise continue to be full steam ahead. He believes that if 2023 proves to be a crisis year for markets, they will lean on technology to deal with it and utilize it. 
• From an IT industry perspective, Sankaran feels that we are in the middle of a cyber war therefore he believes that backups will be treated like borders for organizations, more so as their last line of defense. 
• Sankaran predicts that there will be significant AI/ML advancements over the coming year to the point where it will become ubiquitous. He discusses how tools like ChatGPT are helping people solve challenges but to ensure you have a resilient architecture and infrastructure whenever you are utilizing AI since you have to be able to trace back and solve problems when something goes wrong. 
• Sankaran believes that Kubernetes will get more complex in 2023. He feels that although there is an influx of vendors coming in to fill gaps in the ecosystem, it is making it difficult to choose between all the options. He discusses the challenges of having so many new commercial solutions targeting the problems in the open-source community.
• KubeVirt.io, an open-source project that essentially enables you to run virtualization workloads inside Kubernetes, is a project to watch. However, the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom has led to some uncertainty around it. Sankaran explains that there are similar rumors about the future of Nutanix.
• Sankaran shares CloudCasa’s focus for 2023 telling us they will be going all in on the cloud native ecosystem and the Kubernetes ecosystem. He discusses why the acceleration of cloud technologies as people focus on digital transformation will be key for CloudCasa since they are a backup as a service that is built on the cloud for the cloud with Kubernetes Spark. 
• CloudCasa aims to ensure resilient architecture to recover from in the case of an incident so that organizations’ operations can continue. With more organizations looking at edge computing, Sankaran discusses how they will have solutions ready for their customers to use when they begin adopting modern edge solutions.
• We have seen a shift away from proprietary software toward open-source technology and want to know what they are using, and how it is created and maintained. However, community solutions aim to solve something for the majority in the community, but organizations can run into issues if they do not fit into that majority. Sankaran discusses how commercial vendors’ solutions can help bridge the gap. He tells us that CloudCasa is looking for how to solve problems around the edge cases that the community doesn’t solve, while still looking to embrace open source. 

The summary of the show is written by Emily Nicholls.