Top Transformation Champions: Leading businesses through digital disruption

While digitalisation during the pandemic was born out of necessity, digital-first business models appear set to continue into the new economic reality. According to the Equinix Global Tech Trends Survey, GTTS, 53% of UAE IT leaders said they are accelerating their company’s digital evolution due to COVID-19.

Digital-first goes far beyond cloud-first. To drive a successful digital-first strategy, digital infrastructure must be designed to enable a business to be a disruptor and not one of the disruptions. This means it must meet the challenge through a combination of the digital core, digital ecosystems, and the digital edge in an automated, flexible, edge-to-cloud consumption model.

Successful leaders put digital technology at the centre of business strategy and competitive advantage. Businesses ought to adopt highly efficient digital processes, introduce revolutionary competencies to the workforce, and implement new business models to achieve digital transformation goals.

Businesses need to consider new strategies and gain data-driven insights to maximise their chances of digital transformation success.

Digital transformation requires a business-driven approach to cloud migration. Migrating to the cloud is not just about changing technologies; it is also about changing processes and how businesses provision their hybrid IT infrastructure.

For a successful digital transformation, organisations need to team up with partners to find new skills and services. They also need to connect with customers to better understand their expectations and priorities and meet these expectations with the right digital products and services in the right places.

The transformation also requires interconnection as it enables private, dedicated connectivity between businesses and their partners or customers, helping them ensure reliability, low latency, and data security and privacy.

Due to the increase in companies rigorously adopting new digital business models, this technological boom has created a significant digital divide for businesses still operating with traditional digital infrastructure. Businesses may encounter agility, speed, and security challenges that prevent them from delivering world-class digital products or services to meet their customers’ evolving needs.

It is a demanding process for digital leaders to innovate their existing business infrastructure. Equinix’s on-demand and interconnection services help digital leaders to achieve their goals from anywhere and transform their digital infrastructure effectively.

As organisations move rapidly to the cloud and deliver services consumed at or near the edge, they also need high performance, security, choice, and access to applications, anywhere they do business globally. On the right platform, they can interconnect and bring together the foundational digital infrastructure required to modernise corporate IT and better utilise services such as Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things and Big Data.

The concept of the metaverse goes back decades, but the excitement around it has never been higher than it is now. Indeed, the metaverse is tomorrow’s technology, and cannot be achieved using yesterday’s IT infrastructure. Until enterprises break free from the traditional approach to IT and replace it with modernised, distributed digital infrastructure, they will not be able to deliver the true promise of the metaverse.

Delivering the capabilities and capacity the metaverse demands will require an ecosystem of partners to work together. These include the cloud service providers that help quickly scale compute and enable rapid, reliable data migration; network service providers; and vendor-neutral interconnection partners that bring the whole thing together.

Edge computing holds the key to powering the metaverse. Edge computing reduces latency, improves response times and saves bandwidth, making it perfect for many metaverse use cases. It also puts applications and data close to users, giving users the local computing power necessary while minimising network-based latency and network-congestion risk.

Sustainability has become an important business priority. According to the latest Equinix Global Tech Trends Survey, 82% of tech decision-makers indicate that sustainability is now one of their organisation’s most important drivers, and 85% say they are measuring and actively trying to limit the environmental impact of their IT equipment.

Legacy datacentres use a significant amount of energy to power digital business processes. This is why Equinix has deployed new technologies to help optimise energy consumption at every logical level in the datacentre, from HVAC units to virtual storage to server processors.

The company has also launched its first Co-Innovation Facility, enabling partners to work with the company and conduct trials and develop innovative solutions for the datacentre of the future.

Key takeaways

• 53% of UAE IT leaders indicate they have accelerated the company’s digital evolution due to COVID-19.
• Digital-first goes far beyond cloud-first and is designed primarily to enable a business to be a disruptor.
• Migrating to the cloud requires changing the processes and defining how to provision the hybrid IT infrastructure.
• A modern, distributed digital infrastructure is critical for businesses to deliver the true promise of the metaverse.