February 2021 Research Recap — Cloud And Tech Operations

Lauren Nelson, VP, Research Director

Mar 1 2021

Each month, the infrastructure and operations (I&O) team writes incredible research. As a research director, I get to not only see the final outcome but all of the work and client insights that went into its creation. For those who know me, I am quick to call these out via inquiry calls — but I’d love to capture this on a more permanent platform. For 2021, I’m hoping to blog each month, highlighting a few of my favorites, and include links to the full body of work published that month. Here’s my favorites for the month of February:

“The Forrester Guide To Equipping The Next-Gen Workforce” — Andrew Hewitt dives deep into technology expectations for members of the workforce — and no, this isn’t a “Millennials are lazy” report. In 2007–2010, workplace personas looked at employees as one-dimensional, falsely pushing perceptions of laziness, entitlement, device preferences, and lack of care about job stability. Andrew uses Forrester Analytics’ Business Technographics® data to investigate the best ways to meet the technology requirements of the workforce. Andrew found that generational data obscures bigger differences between workers but does provide many interesting insights. Younger generations, particularly Gen Z workers, expect choice when it comes to hardware, security, and the option to bring their own devices to work.
“Scoring Our 2020 Cloud Predictions” — Tracy Woo critiqued our “Predictions 2020: Cloud Computing” report from last fall, identifying where we nailed it and where our predictions faltered. By reviewing our work, we ensure that we hold ourselves accountable while allowing for greater accuracy next year. No surprise, 2020 caught us off guard. We faltered in several of our predictions by being too early on long-term changes while failing to predict public cloud jumping back into hypergrowth. To our surprise, we got some predictions right. We successfully predicted the increase in cloud-native across containers and serverless. We also saw a surprising amount of replatforming and containerization from among independent software vendors and major software-as-a-service players despite an unprecedented year.