Today’s CIOs are on the accelerating path of digital transformation in organizations of all kinds. They recognize that the ability to securely, sustainably, and dynamically deploy and use the right digital infrastructure will be a major foundation for future competitive advantage. By 2023, according to IDC, digital infrastructure will be the underlying platform for all IT and business automation initiatives anytime, anywhere. Such platforms need to enable the seamless exchange of data and operations between edge-to-core ecosystems. Working with more than 10,000 enterprise customers and partners around the world to drive digital infrastructure strategies, there is a tendency to eradicate the bespoke nature of how IT is deployed and consumed within a few years. Driven by the demand for software-defined, agile, automated digital infrastructure as a service for autonomous driving, DevOps engineers will lead the delivery of new on-demand IT services and applications.
Hybrid multi-cloud is becoming a major architecture in application modernization and delivery of infrastructure services, a new complexity that requires more programmable infrastructure, transparent asset management, and cost predictability. It leads to the challenge. Over the next five years, artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI / ML) will become more sophisticated as enterprises demand operational self-healing infrastructure and applications. This shift reduces reliance on human involvement, leverages greater machine processing power, and enables the environment to autonomously anticipate and dynamically adapt to changing resource demand.
In this new world, security is no longer a retrofit, as organizations assume that digital infrastructure services are inherently secure and software configurable. Sustainability is expected of all businesses today. This is an important and negotiable point for business success, as companies and their supply chain partners have a universal commitment to net-zero carbon footprints for the development of all facilities, products, and services. Given this dynamic digital transformation landscape, the 2022 forecast delves into the general drivers of accelerating and driving the deployment and consumption of digital infrastructure over the next decade.
Overcoming the complexity of hybrid multi-cloud will determine the success of Digital First
By 2023, 40% of Forbes Global 2000 will have readjusted the cloud selection process and focus on business outcomes rather than IT needs. One of IT’s biggest challenges in this transition is to support the organization’s business strategy across hybrid multi-clouds while managing increasing complexity. Over the next decade, hybrid multi-cloud will play a key role in how organizations drive their digital-first strategies and leverage their IT infrastructure as a service. Digital leaders who break through the complexity of the cloud, data, and ecosystem through automation, AI / ML, APIs, and edge services gain a significant competitive advantage.
Cloud automation accelerates the use of digital infrastructure
The complexity of hybrid multi-clouds is increasing as the boundaries between private and public clouds and on-premises workloads become blurred. Cloud automation that leverages AI/ML-enabled cloud services will significantly reduce the management overhead and costs of public cloud infrastructure and operations. Cloud automation will also improve critical functions such as DevOps for application modernization and security for risk detection across hybrid multi-cloud architectures—accelerating labor-intensive functions for greater optimization.
Implications:
Cloud automation will simplify creating and configuring cloud computing assets and streamline complex billing and ordering systems across multiple cloud platforms. More importantly, reaction-driven automation systems will be able to detect when it’s time to allocate and de-allocate dynamic resources as demand increases or decreases, eliminating the legacy processes that make this a more complex and time-consuming operation.
A connected cloud ecosystem improves infrastructure agility
In the future, hybrid multi-cloud will be a team sport. By working with a connected ecosystem of diverse cloud service providers, you can unleash expanded use cases and new sources of business value. For a hybrid multi-cloud environment to function as a coherent whole rather than a series of disjointed parts, organizations need to democratize cloud access and use AI / ML to dynamically move workloads between clouds. Cloud-native businesses switch sides when migrating from the cloud to on-premises infrastructure to improve performance and scalability, giving businesses more hybrid cloud choices.
Implications:
To hit the sweet spot of capitalizing on hybrid multi-cloud value while mitigating complexity and cost, enterprises will use ecosystem partnerships in new and innovative ways, driving greater cloud repatriation. In a vendor-neutral ecosystem, enterprises can use public clouds as an extension of their private infrastructure and vice versa, creating the infrastructure agility to maximize the value of both. Open-source tools such as Kubernetes, containers, and microservices will continue to play a critical role in these workload migrations, while APIs will help enterprises templatize and automate the deployment of migration circuits.
AI/ML at the edge will power 5G and IoT
Data at the edge is exploding as 5G and IoT technologies flourish, driving a global edge computing market that’s projected to reach $43.4 billion by 2027. Information from self-driving cars, drones, surveillance cameras, and medical IoT devices requires real-time AI / ML model inference at the network edge. AI-equipped robots provide services from food cultivation and transportation to food delivery and cooking. Progress is being made in the area of legal/public policy to properly address AI / ML ethics in terms of fairness, accountability, and privacy.
Data control and governance requirements lead to AI marketplaces.
Organizations need to leverage external data (i.e., from public clouds, data brokers, and IoT devices) to build more accurate AI / ML models. However, data providers are reluctant to share raw data that consumers may use for fraudulent purposes. Similarly, data consumers are concerned about the lineage of data and models (transfer learning scenarios) they receive from external sources for security, bias, and quality reasons.
Impact:
Enterprises use the AI Marketplace to securely exchange data and algorithms among multiple parties and maintain CoC with respect to privacy. The AI marketplace will be blockchain-enabled so consumers can track the source of their data and AI models. It also provides a secure enclave in a neutral location where raw data never leaves the enclave, helping providers continue to manage their data.
To ensure privacy and compliance, it is important that your data stays within the security boundaries of your organization or country. Over the next five years, data gravity, latency, and privacy will shift AI architecture from a centralized model to a decentralized model, making decentralized AI orchestras and control aspects the norm.
As organizations expand their digital footprint, dismantling silos and establishing an integrated cyber security environment is a top priority for Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs). With cloud and edge deployments, an increasing operational technology footprint, and a decentralized workforce, CISOs prioritize displaying businesses as attackers and integrating physical and digital threat situations increase.
Impact:
Since all enterprises are now software enterprises, applying the Dev Sec Ops model and the secure software development life cycle (SSDLC) ensures automated security throughout the development process. From sustainable finance to renewable energy innovation, IT organizations around the world are rethinking operational policies, innovating product design, and optimizing supply chain partnerships with companies, technologies, and strategies in line with global climate goals.
Conclusion
Certain companies are always striving to stay ahead of the next steps in our customers’ needs, so it’s important to regularly retreat to account for the changes that will be unfolding in our digital infrastructure over the next decade. The stakes to get it right are increasing. Recent market research on Global Interconnection Index (GXI) Volume 5 benchmarking company and service provider data allows organizations to adopt a digital-first strategy to connect for provisioning and use. This shows that it is 4.5 times more advanced by using the digital infrastructure.
About Author
