2017 – APAC’s Step Towards Digital Maturity

Looking
back at 2016, the IT sector has been dominated by the realization that it needs
to make better use of its data and digital assets and become leaner and more
agile than ever before.

With
digital transformation appearing the agenda of CIOs across the world, we can
expect to see an increasing number of organizations striving to reach digital
maturity in 2017. This is backed up by recent research from Forbes Insights,
which revealed that 42% of organizations in Asia Pacific consider themselves
either advanced or leaders in terms of their digital transformation journey.

Aside
from the implied continued rise of digital maturity, there are some other key
trends that I expect will gain some ground in 2017:

#1:
Productivity Gains Will Be More About People, Process and Business Outcomes

Despite
the explosion of new technology over the past 10 years, productivity has
declined compared to the previous decade according to the Organization for
Economic Co-operation and Development. This is possibly because processes have
not kept up with new technologies.

Thus,
agile infrastructure, migrating to cloud, and the benefits of DevOps will gain
greater attention as a way to speed up the development and deployment of
applications and services with the winning combination of less error, yet less
effort required. The ultimate aim of this is to reduce IT “busy work” and
reassign intellect towards innovation.

Agile
infrastructure and cloud delivery models will empower those with the most
business insight and most innovative ideas to drive their own technology
projects. 2017 will be about putting the power of innovation into the hands of
those with the best ideas.

#2:
Accelerating Transition to Cloud

When
speaking of a transition to “cloud” I like to differentiate between moving to
“The Cloud”, which most people intuitively equate with public cloud and moving
to “cloud” which people often confuse with public cloud when they might mean
modern, agile, self-service infrastructure even if it is largely based on
premise.  I think we will see the continued rise of both types in 2017 and
discussions around both continue to be relevant.

The
Asian market has been relatively quick to embrace the Cloud, with Asia leading
the world in this year’s Cloud
Readiness Index.  My feeling is that, IT managers across
APAC will be focused on developing skills in Cloud monitoring, Cloud workload
performance and security management, as well as Cloud capacity management. This
will support their moves toward big “C” Cloud.

For
little “c” cloud I feel customers will want more simplicity and automation for
those pieces that remain on premise.  Instead of buying infrastructure
from different vendors and knitting them together with management software, IT
will want access to the converged systems that can most easily deliver
infrastructure-as-a-service without being a science experiment. By combining
converged solutions with cloud management solutions, enterprises can deliver a
pre-engineered approach for private, and hybrid cloud via a single management
interface.

#3:
Bimodal IT

Bimodal
IT refers to two modes of IT – 1. Traditional: emphasizing safety, accuracy and
availability and 2. Nonlinear: emphasizing agility and speed. While many may
wish for the ability to simply do away with legacy application stacks and start
afresh, the reality of the need for business continuity built on well
understood and supported mission-critical systems continues. I expect bimodal
IT to continue for some time yet, possibly in the same way that we will see
both big “C” and little “c” cloud for some time yet, and for similar reasons.

From a
storage perspective, it is important that data from both IT modes can be
leveraged, so organizations will look more to systems that can bridge the gap
between the two. This means the ability to present cloud protocols, the
capability to be instantiated on premise or in public clouds and to facilitate
data mobility between these environments. Tools like Pentaho Enterprise Data
Integration, that can bring together the data warehouse of mode 1, with the
unstructured data of mode 2 to provide users with a clear view of all their
data, will gain significant traction.  

#4: A
Centralized Data Hub

Data is
becoming increasingly valuable. Recent
IDC research revealed that 53% of
organizations in the region consider big data and analytics important and have
adopted or plan to adopt it in the near future. Companies are finding new ways
to correlate and merge data from different sources to gain more insight, while
repurposing old data for different uses.

Highly
disruptive Internet-based businesses have shown that the ability to wield data
effectively is extremely valuable. To ensure the governance and accessibility
of this data, IT needs to create a centralized data hub for better management,
use and protection of data. This “repository of everything an organization
knows” will need to be an object store that can scale beyond the limitations of
traditional storage systems, ingest data from different sources, and provide
search across public and private clouds as well as mobile devices. 

#5:
Growing Awareness of IoT in the Data Center

The
decisions we make in IT in 2017 should be made with an eye towards IoT. The
integration of IT and OT with analytics is the first step. Today, IoT requires
data scientists and researchers with deep domain expertise and most projects
are in the proof-of-concept stage. Hitachi Data Systems, along with other
divisions in Hitachi and outside partners, is developing an IoT core platform,
Lumada, to develop and deliver baked IoT solutions that are open, adaptable,
verified and secure.

Next
year’s trends are being driven by a clear enterprise demand to deliver on all
the promises of digital transformation, with APAC set to lead the way.
Regardless of industry, IT is seeing a fundamental shift as enterprises embrace
the new revenue streams, efficiencies and possibilities provided by
digitization.