Enterprise and mid-sized businesses across vertical industries are transforming at breakneck pace. People, operational processes, and the underpinning technology platform is at the heart of this transformation which will redefine the business and competitive landscape across every vertical industry.
Lines of business and functional units are demanding an infinitely scalable, highly agile and resilient infrastructure that can power traditional mission critical as well as modern data-driven workloads and micro-services.
IDC’s CEO Priorities survey 2020 showed that the #1 priority of the respondents is building a digital IT infrastructure that supports resilient operations and pervasive experiences.
Organizations which make strategic investments in the next 3 to 5 years in modernizing and transforming their IT infrastructure will be in good stead to successfully align to the changing business paradigm.
Digital infrastructure: the need to transform
Business demands Agility, Flexibility and Infinite Scale: Organizations increasingly need IT infrastructure which is agile and flexible enough to support the rapidly changing business imperatives which are cornerstone for success in the digital economy.
IDC’s Enterprise Infrastructure survey showed that organizations expect to generate 51% of their revenues from digitally connected products, services, and customer experiences in Asia/Pacific in 2023, up from 34% in 2020.
The need to transform IT infrastructure stems from the fact that business cycles have shrunk dramatically in the last 5 years to less than a year, compared with 2-to-3-year cycles prior to that period which is creating new KPIs and SLAs that IT needs to meet.
Customer centricity and experience are extremely critical for success which require businesses to use data-driven intelligence to understand changing customer preferences and buyer sentiment.
Cloud-Centricity: The emergence of public cloud has accelerated the need to modernize traditional on and off-premises infrastructure which can deliver highly dynamic and optimized IT services in a secure manner.
Modern future-ready digital infrastructure is inherently designed to deliver innovative hardware, software, and abstraction technologies to support reliable digital services and digital experiences by meeting the disparate infrastructure resource and resiliency requirements of traditional mission-critical applications as well as next-generation modern workloads.
Autonomous IT Operations: Businesses need technology platform which can deliver IT services in an automated fashion using AI/ML-powered software tools that can intelligently provision and orchestrate resources to address changing business KPIs and SLAs without human intervention.
Autonomous IT improves agility and responsiveness, as well as helps organizations rationalize their operational IT costs by redeploying human capital to drive innovation and create capabilities for data-driven innovation.
Modern Data-driven Workloads: In the digital business paradigm, applications and microservices are built using an agile environment using new and exciting modular building block technologies such as containers, NoSQL databases and modern programming languages such as Python, Ruby and Perl.
Modern applications use APIs to expose infrastructure RAS capabilities while traditional infrastructure was provisioned and fine-tuned for the highest levels of RAS capabilities and features which an application may require to meet the stringent demands from line of business.
Asia/Pacific organizations are running 34% of all applications, workloads and microservices in containers in 2020, according to responses from 441 IT decision makers during the Enterprise Infrastructure survey done in September 2020.
The mix of workloads running in containers will increase to 43.9% in the next 24 months.
Edge Workloads Expansion: Spending on edge infrastructure continues to grow at a blistering pace with WW spending on server and storage for edge deployment expected to have grown 11.3% in 2020 which will increase to 22.7% in 2021, compared with 1% decline and a sliver 2.5% increase during the corresponding time periods.
The advent of new and exciting technologies such as IoT, Artificial Intelligence (AI), 5G, MEC and NFV are helping to spur new use cases at the edge locations such as remote workforce, media streaming and web conferencing, to name a few.
IDC expects more than 50% of all new workloads and applications between 2020 and the next several years will be deployed at the edge locations.
Data-driven Innovation: Modern infrastructure with data management platform that delivers data access, data analysis, data protection and resilience, as well as data governance capabilities is helping organizations accelerate their data-driven innovation to deliver exciting business outcomes such as operational and business model transformation, pervasive customer experiences and quickly bringing to market new products.
What exactly is future-ready digital infrastructure?
Future Enterprises need to deliver digitally connected products and services, modern customer / work experiences in an automated fashion and drive operational model change that ensures intelligent business operations for sustained competitive advantage in the digital era. Future enterprises need an extremely resilient, flexible, agile, and scalable technology platform to deliver modern workloads and microservices that supports constantly changing business paradigm.
The current infrastructure is Rigid, Tuned-to-legacy-apps, built for the past business KPIs, and still very platform centric. Digital Infrastructure in the future will need to build capabilities to dynamically provision and orchestrate resources dynamically using API calls made by the workload and application
The emerging digital infrastructure ecosystem will ensure ever faster delivery of innovative hardware, software, and abstraction technologies for seamless integration to support reliable digital services and digital experiences.
IDC believes that the shift to modern future-ready digital infrastructure will have significant and far-reaching implications for technology buyers. It includes but is not limited to:
- a large percentage of a digital enterprise’s revenue depends upon the responsiveness, scalability, and resiliency of the infrastructure deployed within its own facilities
- and its ability to take advantage of third-party provided and operated infrastructure resources delivered as a service.
On its 5th year, IDC is once again looking for best Digital Transformation use cases and leaders in Asia/Pacific, through its IDC Future Enterprise Awards (formerly DX Awards). Digital Infrastructure is one of the nine new digital agenda items characteristic of the Future Enterprise - IDC’s new benchmark for what it takes to lead in the digital economy in a changed world.
Now if you are an organization that has reimagined your business through cloud-centric computing, autonomous operations or ubiquitous deployment, nominate yourself HERE or at www.nominate.idcdxawards.com to qualify for Best in Future of Digital Infrastructure. For more information on the IDC Future Enterprise Awards, log on to www.idcdxawards.com.
