The global pandemic has pushed every industry and organization to embrace digital transformation, exposing businesses to multiple IT challenges.
As organizations seek to accelerate their transformation initiatives, they’re needing to turn away from monolithic and centralized data architectures and embrace flexible, modular, and distributed data approaches. At the same time, businesses must manage growing volumes of data across myriad applications and rapidly scaling platforms, along with a requirement to exchange data with new communities of business partners.
Although the technology businesses need to harness data and stay ahead is proliferating faster than ever, there’s still much more change to come. After all, the future is autonomous, ubiquitous, and workload centric. Cloud and edge computing will transform interconnectivity, even as employee homes become resident nodes of the corporate LAN.
Winning in this environment means discouraging complexity without restricting the enterprise’s ability to seize the opportunities that data and technologies bring. A new study from IDC indicates that by 2026, mid-market companies are likely to have transferred 65 percent of infrastructure spending from traditional channels to more app-centric trusted advisers.
Ensuring secure data exchange is also critical. As IDC’s study also highlights, by 2025 public enterprise valuations are likely to be based on confidence in the data controls organizations have implemented for the effective use of data, not just on financial controls.
In this special feature, I asked six Digital Realty executives for their views on these issues. Among other things, we discuss the ongoing surge of information, the need for secure data exchange across the world, and how leading data center industry players are seizing the opportunity to facilitate digital transformation. The executives also reflected on 2021 and highlighted some of the biggest challenges they faced.
