Cost, complexity, capability, three pain points

REGIONAL TRANSFORMATION OUTLOOK 2019

The world of today has changed drastically due to data. Every process, whether an external client interaction or internal employee task, leaves a trail of data. Human and machine generated data is growing ten times faster than traditional business data, and machine data is growing at 50 times that of traditional business data.

With the way we consume and interact with data changing daily, the number of innovations to enhance business agility and operational efficiency are also plentiful. In this environment, it is vital for enterprises to understand the demand for intelligent data management in order to stay one step ahead and deliver enhanced services to their customers.

With companies operating across borders and the reliance on technology growing more prominent than ever, an expansion in multi-cloud usage is almost inevitable. On-premises data and applications will not become obsolete, but that the deployment models for data will expand with an increasing mix of on-premises, SaaS, IaaS, managed clouds and private clouds. Over time, we expect more of the workload to shift off-premises, but this transition will take place over years.

The versatalist or generalist role will increasingly become the new operating model for the majority of IT organisations. The future of digital is still analogue: it is people. Talent shortages combined with new, collapsing on-premises infrastructure and public cloud and SaaS, are leading to broader technicians with background in a wide variety of disciplines, and increasingly a greater business awareness as well.

Standardisation, orchestration and automation are contributing factors that will accelerate this, as more capable systems allow for administrators to take a more horizontal view rather than a deep specialisation. Specialisation will of course remain important, but as IT becomes more and more fundamental to business outcomes, it stands to reason that IT talent will likewise need to understand the wider business and add value across many IT domains.

Cost, complexity and capability are the 3C pain points. These 3 C’s continue to be why people in data centers are unhappy with solutions from other vendors. Broadly speaking, these are excessive costs, unnecessary complexity and a lack of capability, which manifests as speed of backup, speed of restoration or instant mounting to a virtual machine image. These three major criteria will continue to dominate the reasons why organisations augment or fully replace their backup solution.

2019 will be more about the technology becoming fully standardised and tested, and future-proofing devices to ensure they can work with the technology when it becomes more widely available. For resellers and cloud service providers, excitement will centre on the arrival of new revenue opportunities leveraging 5G or infrastructure to support it. Processing these higher volumes of data in real-time, at a faster speed, new hardware and device requirements, and new applications for managing data will all present opportunities and will help facilitate conversations around edge computing.

Key takeaways

• Every process, whether an external client interaction or internal employee task, leaves a trail of data.
• With companies operating across borders and the reliance on technology growing more prominent than ever, an expansion in multi-cloud usage is almost inevitable.
• The versatalist or generalist role will increasingly become the new operating model for the majority of IT organisations.
• The future of digital is still analogue: it is people.
• As IT becomes fundamental to business outcomes, IT talent will likewise need to understand the wider business and add value across many IT domains.