The ability to transform and modernize IT infrastructure to a cloud-enabled digital infrastructure ? one that runs in an autonomous fashion and deliver ubiquitous experience across different locations ? will be a key strategic imperative for businesses to succeed in the Next Normal, according to IDC. Revenue growth and business expansion can be accelerated by tightly aligning the key tenets of digital infrastructure (technology adoption and IT governance) through the use of cloud-centric hardware and software building blocks.
IDC?s CEO Agenda research in early 2020 showed that by 2025, businesses in APeJ expect to generate 38% of their revenues from digitally enabled products, services, and customer experiences ? up from 21% this year. In order to achieve business transformation goals, building a digital IT infrastructure that supports resilient operations and pervasive experiences will be the #1 priority by 27.6% of CIOs. Flexibility, agility, resilience, cost-optimization, and highly scalable infrastructure will be a key underpinning for businesses to power next-generation data-driven workloads to deliver new and exciting business outcomes for enterprises? sustainability.
The CxO view from this early 2020 research also revealed some very interesting and exciting insights to support the rapid evolution and adoption of Digital Infrastructure:
- 47.1% mentioned developing a sustainable, cost effective digital infrastructure as the #1 Digital Infrastructure priority that will help them deliver reliable digital services and experiences.
- 42.6% believe that delivering a digital infrastructure resiliency plan is critical to ensure that they can successfully deliver the digital business agenda.
- 39.7% felt that the ability to successfully build hybrid / multi-cloud capabilities is a challenge that needs to be addressed in 2020.
?Digital infrastructure will be the underpinning engine, which will power AI/ML enabled data-driven workloads and microservices, to win in the digital economy. CIOs who take the leap of faith by accelerating the digital infrastructure adoption will define and architect their organization?s success and leadership in the respective vertical industry,? says Rajnish Arora, Vice President for Enterprise Computing research at IDC Asia/Pacific.
Businesses across vertical industries are rapidly expanding their digital infrastructure, which is expanding beyond traditional enterprise data centres, and private and public clouds to include edge infrastructure such as multi-access edge computing nodes (MAECs), campuses, buildings, and metro colocation facilities. IDC believes that digital infrastructure will include resources that facilitate rapid adaptation of applications and code to enhance customer experiences, embed intelligence and automation into business operations, and support ongoing industry innovation at edge locations.
Digital infrastructure will be defined by software-enabled intelligence, which will be able to abstract, provision and orchestrate compute, storage and network resources using underpinning hardware, to address myriad workload requirements and business KPIs. Business resiliency and flexibility will be a key hallmark of digital infrastructure which will enable businesses to constantly realign to changing market and competitive landscape.
The emerging digital infrastructure ecosystem will increasingly be built on cloud-centric technologies, ubiquitous deployment options, and automated IT operations. IDC expects by the end of 2021, 80% of enterprises will put a mechanism in place to shift to cloud-centric digital infrastructure twice as fast as before the pandemic. The current crisis has simply accelerated the adoption of digital infrastructure which will further widen the chasm between digital innovators and digitally determined enterprises Vs digitally distraught organizations.
