According to Ettienne Reinecke, Dimension Data’s Group Chief Technology Officer, social, mobile, cloud, analytics, Internet of Things, and bimodal IT are all hot topics in the IT industry which divide IT functions and teams in organisations worldwide. But, he says, where do organisations prioritise their budgets and resources. “All of these trends and technologies serve a larger purpose, because they enable the transformation of an organisation to become a digital enterprise. In other words, the business uses IT to respond faster to market opportunities and threats, and prioritises the experience of the people it works with, whether they’re customers, employees, or business partners.”
Reinecke said the digital transformation conversations that Dimension Data’s teams are having with organisations revolve around four themes: data at the core of the transformation, hybrid cloud as mechanism for agility, workspaces for tomorrow, and cybersecurity.
- Digital Infrastructure: It’s all about understanding your data … and how to exploit it. The role of data has fundamentally changed. For many years, data centre professionals would concentrate much of their time and energy on things like storage drives and backups, and how best to perform tasks such as replication and de-duplication. Then, the primary focus was reducing the cost of managing data. Now, that’s all changed. Today it’s all about honing your ability to exploit data and finding ways to turn it into business value.
- Hybrid Cloud: Private cloud adoption will increase in 2016. The next twelve months will see an increase in private cloud adoption, as savvy IT decision-makers with a ‘cloud first’ strategy move to adopt new managed private cloud offerings with consumption-based commercial models.
- Workspaces for Tomorrow: Work behaviours will be shaped more radically by social media in 2016. Much of social collaboration is enabled by consumer-focused tools. Technologies such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and many others have given rise to robust and business-oriented counterparts that offer audio, video, file-sharing, and workflow integration. These include applications such as Cisco’s ‘team-rooming’ solution Spark, Microsoft’s Yammer and Skype for Business, Viber, WhatsApp, Slack, and many others. These technologies encourage the creation of communities; living, working, shopping, and interacting ‘out loud’; sharing ideas; easily finding people and information; collaboration; and faster decision-making. These behaviours will make their way into more and more organisations in 2016, allowing end users to work together seamlessly from different geographies, and at different times of the day.
- Cybersecurity: High profile security breaches are set to continue in 2016, and more executives will become the targets of hackers. The slew of high-profile security breaches that took place in 2015 are set to continue in 2016. And the disturbing new trend of ‘whaling’ will see hackers target senior executives with ransomware, demanding money or using their information fraudulently. In addition, forensics will play a major role in the cybersecurity space in the next 12 months.
