The last 10 years have seen an unprecedented data proliferation. More than ever before, we have critical masses of data with the capability to lead to profitable predictions across industries, becoming a source of revenue and disruptive innovation. Organisations are investing in digital transformation to adapt to ongoing changes, and outperform their competitors. Organisations like these have been dubbed as data thrivers by IDC , stating that they their new customer acquisition and increased profitability is three times greater than enterprises that aren’t data driven. Digitally enhancing operations and offerings allows business leaders to collect and analyse data, and gain insights that can help unlock new business opportunities.
2019 is giving way to four new tech trends that could ignite the passion that enterprises need to accelerate their digital transformation and become data thrivers.
1. AI developments will skyrocket thanks to Cloud
AI is set to become a norm in Asia Pacific, with 55 percent of organisations in the region already implementing or are expanding the use of AI this year. Organisations are expected to increasingly deploy cloud-based AI software and service tools in 2019, to ensure that AI applications deliver high performance and scalability, both on and off premises, and support multiple data access protocols and varied new data formats. This also calls for the infrastructure supporting AI workloads to be fast, resilient, and automated. While AI will certainly become the next battleground for infrastructure vendors, most development will start in the cloud.
2. Edge devices will only keep getting better
Asia Pacific is expected to house 8.6 billion Internet of Things (IoT) devices by 2020 and become the world’s largest 5G region with 675 million 5G connections by 2025. To take advantage of the resulting data deluge, organisations will need the ability to process data at the edge to quickly gain insights and make real-time decisions. IoT devices and applications will therefore increasingly come with built-in services such as data analysis and data reduction. This will enable them to make better, faster and smarter decisions about what data requires immediate action, what data gets sent home to the core or to the cloud, and even what data can be discarded.
3. Most large organisations will opt for hybrid, multi-cloud, whereas others will chose a single cloud provider for the simplicity and consistency
By 2024, 90 percent of the G1000 organisations will mitigate vendor lock-in through multi and hybrid cloud technologies. By using technologies such as containers and data fabric, these organisations will be able to flexibly and easily move workloads across environments while having full control over them.
Despite the benefits of hybrid and multi-cloud, they will not be the default IT architecture for smaller organisations. This is because data itself can be far less portable than compute and application resources, which affects the portability of runtime environments. Moreover, some cloud services may be exclusive to a particular cloud provider, which means that those services cannot be ported to other environments. Regardless of the path chosen, organisations will also need to develop supporting policies and practices to fully benefit from cloud adoption.
4. Apps don’t need to move whilst data services are becoming invisible
Since the rise of containers will result in the trend toward abstraction of individual systems and services, it will drive IT architects to design for data and data processing and to build hybrid, multi-cloud data fabrics rather than just data centers.
With the application of predictive technologies and diagnostics, decision makers will become increasingly reliant on robust yet “invisible” data services that deliver data when and where it’s needed, regardless of where it is stored. These new capabilities will also automate the brokerage of infrastructure services as dynamic commodities and the shuttling of containers and workloads to and from the most efficient service provider solutions for the job.
2019 will also see the emergence of container-based cloud orchestration technologies that enable hybrid cloud app development. Since this means that new apps will be developed for both public cloud and on-premises use cases, it will make it easier to move workloads to where data is being generated instead of porting data to where apps sit.
In this dynamic and ever-changing digital economy, it is vital for organisations to turn data into a strategic asset while flexibly responding to market changes. In order to grow and succeed in this economy, businesses must embrace hybrid cloud, containers, and edge computing, and not look back.
