In 2016, CEOs and CIOs led their organisations in adopting a number of new enterprise technologies to improve daily business operations. This was largely driven by an increasing understanding of the need for digital transformation, and often delivered through a hybrid IT approach, and by leveraging cloud and disaster recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS). Combined with the sustained growth of mobility, big data, and the Internet of Things (IoT), these technologies, and their business benefits, will continue to prevail in 2017.
As we enter the new year, CEOs and CIOs should consider 3 leading technology trends that will dominate in the year ahead:
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Digital transformation with hybrid IT
Organisations are adapting to digital disruption, moving from the awareness to the adoption stage on their IT transformation journey. CEOs are, in turn, choosing hybrid IT as their infrastructure of choice to deliver transformative results for their organisations. According to a Frost & Sullivan report, the majority of Asia–Pacific organisations see the strategic role of IT as achieving growth momentum and digitally transforming the organisation.
Next year, more businesses will move towards a combination of in-house and third-party hybrid IT services for security, data centre, cloud and application services. This will let them drive agility, maintain competitiveness and modernise their IT environment without having to over-commit to CAPEX.
Further, we’ll see a heightened demand for application services and predictive analytics that can be combined with on-premise infrastructure so that businesses can scale as needed. There will also be an increased uptake of software-defined everything, helping organisations overcome internal IT skills gap challenges and achieve digital transformation.
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Cloud as enabler for business
In the new year, more CEOs will turn to cloud infrastructure and services to enable their organisations’ growth and digital transformation. Large scale migration to cloud-based platforms is expected, especially as managed services providers (MSPs) offer more holistic solutions to help reduce the cloud challenges for businesses, such as uptime issues, security and loss of data control.
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DRaaS: a new solution to an old problem
Business leaders know that the capital costs involved with disaster recovery can be significant, particularly if an organisation chooses to operate a dedicated remote data centre as well as its on-premise set up. In 2017, we will see DRaaS widely deployed as a reliable solution to this old, costly problem.
DRaaS will be popular for organisations deploying cloud services to boost their scalability, flexibility, and business transformation. This model is cheaper because the cloud infrastructure is spread between numerous subscribers and the replica servers that reside in the cloud platform only need to be activated when a disruptive event happens.
It’s important that CEOs and CIOs don’t consider these technologies in isolation. The availability of managed services strongly influences the uptake of cloud and hybrid IT models, and both factors impact the success of an enterprise’s digital transformation journey.
By considering hybrid IT, cloud and DRaaS, CEOs can better prepare their organisation to adapt to digital transformation and changing technologies, while maximising their existing IT investments and ensuring the organisation’s market competitiveness.
