5. A Year of Migration: As organizations migrate to new Microsoft platforms over the next year, they will need various storage management and data management technologies in place. While upgrading is not always a priority for IT organizations, given tight budgets and the resources needed to manage the process, newer versions can offer significant technological advancements and performance enhancements that can help organizations better meet their SLAs.

As organizations migrate, they will likely make technology improvements across the board to provide improved protection and management that will support all Microsoft applications in the most efficient way.

However, it is important that organizations not treat these new applications in a silo manner and apply platform level backup, deduplication, archiving, retention, and E-Discovery solutions.  A trusted platform can address both new and old applications in a centralized way. 

6. Virtualization Moves Beyond x86: In 2010, more users will be able to benefit from virtualization as competition increases among providers. Not only will Hyper-V provide added functionality with Windows Server 2008 R2, IBM will likely have continued support with AIX. 

In 2010, it will be clear that users can leverage all flavours of virtualization, not just x86. As virtualization becomes even more widespread and prolific, users will need to implement strategies and technologies that help them to manage the entire IT infrastructure – whether physical or virtual – in a robust, yet simplified and user-friendly way.

7. Cloud Storage Catches On: As a growing number of enterprises look for ways to improve storage efficiency and reduce management complexity of their growing environments, they look to leverage storage architecture designs already deployed by storage service and public cloud providers.

Most will begin to recognize the combination of commodity hardware infrastructure and value-added software as the best approach to deliver storage to the business, but will need to decide between public, private or hybrid models.

In evaluating their options, enterprise storage managers must consider the cost, scalability, availability, manageability and performance of any solution that will serve as the foundation for file-based storage services. 

8. Cloud Storage Drives Data Management: The continued move to cloud storage over the next year will drive enterprise organizations to implement more effective data management tools and strategies. While users can leverage cloud computing to ensure enhanced application performance and availability, there are also inherent risks that administrators will need to address to leverage this flexibility.

9. Organizations Can No Longer Procrastinate ‘Going Green’: In 2009, organizations began to shift from implementing “green” technologies primarily for cost reduction purposes, to a more balanced awareness of also improving the organization’s environmental standing.  In 2010, these two drivers will push most enterprise organizations to implement a ‘green’ strategy. 

IT decision makers are increasingly justifying green IT solutions by more than cost and IT efficiency benefits. They are now looking to a number of factors such as reducing electricity consumption, cooling costs and corporate pressure to be ‘green.’ 

The author is Director, Systems Engineering at Symantec.