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IDC FutureScape: Top 10 Predictions for the Future of Digital Infrastructure

International Data Corporation's (IDC) top 10 predictions for the Future of Digital Infrastructure point to a digital infrastructure strategy that addresses resiliency and trust; data-driven operational complexity; and business outcomes-driven sourcing and autonomous operations.

Organizations must invest in and foster a digital-first culture that leverages trusted industry ecosystems, generates profitable revenue growth, provides empathetic customer experiences, and demonstrates an ability to adapt operating models to complex customer requirements.

In the coming years, organizations will deploy, operate, and scale digital infrastructure to ensure consistent security, performance, and compliance across all resources, regardless of where and how they are deployed. These organizations will invest in more intelligent, autonomous operations and take advantage of flexible consumption and strategic vendor partnerships to promote agility and ensure that the business, and its digital infrastructure, can continue to perform in the face of a wide range of unexpected scenarios – social, geopolitical, economic, climate, or business related.

"Digital infrastructure spans compute, storage, network, and infrastructure software, including virtualization and containers, and the automation, AI/ML analytics, and security software and cloud services needed to maintain and optimize both legacy and modern applications and data," explained Mary Johnston Turner, Research VP, Future of Digital Infrastructure. "IDC's 2022 predictions for the future of digital infrastructure identify critical shifts in governance, operations, architecture, and sourcing that need to be factored into enterprise digital transformation strategies going forward."

The top 10 predictions from the Worldwide Future of Digital Infrastructure 2022 report are:

Prediction 1

By 2023, G2000 leaders will prioritize business objectives over infrastructure choice, deploying 50% of new strategic workloads using vendor-specific APIs that add value but reduce workload portability.

Prediction 2

In 2023, over 80% of the G2000 will cite business resiliency to drive verifiable infrastructure supply chain integrity as a mandatory and non-negotiable vendor evaluation criterion.

Prediction 3

By 2023, most C-suite leaders will implement business critical KPIs tied to data availability, recovery, and stewardship as rising levels of cyber-attacks expose the scale of data at risk.

Prediction 4

By 2024, 75% of G2000 digital infrastructure RFPs will require vendors to prove progress on ESG/Sustainability initiatives with data, as CIOs rely on infrastructure vendors to help meet ESG goals.

Prediction 5

By 2024, due to an explosion of edge data, 65% of the G2000 will embed edge-first data stewardship, security, and network practices into data protection plans to integrate edge data into relevant processes.

Prediction 6

By 2025, a 6x explosion in high dependency workloads leads to 65% of G2000 firms using consistent architectural governance frameworks to ensure compliance reporting and audit of their infrastructure.

Prediction 7

By 2025, 60% of enterprises will fund LOB and IT projects through OPEX budgets, matching how vendors provide their services with a focus on outcomes that are determined by SLAs and KPIs.

Prediction 8

By 2025, 70% of companies will invest in alternative computing technologies to drive business differentiation by compressing time to value of insights from complex data sets.

Prediction 9

By 2026, 90% of G2000 CIOs will use AIOps solutions to drive automated remediation and workload placement decisions that include cost and performance metrics, improving resiliency and agility.

Prediction 10

By 2026, mid-market companies will shift 65% of infrastructure spending from traditional channels towards more app-centric trusted advisors.

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IDC FutureScape: Top 10 Predictions for the Future of Digital Infrastructure

International Data Corporation's (IDC) top 10 predictions for the Future of Digital Infrastructure point to a digital infrastructure strategy that addresses resiliency and trust; data-driven operational complexity; and business outcomes-driven sourcing and autonomous operations.

Organizations must invest in and foster a digital-first culture that leverages trusted industry ecosystems, generates profitable revenue growth, provides empathetic customer experiences, and demonstrates an ability to adapt operating models to complex customer requirements.

In the coming years, organizations will deploy, operate, and scale digital infrastructure to ensure consistent security, performance, and compliance across all resources, regardless of where and how they are deployed. These organizations will invest in more intelligent, autonomous operations and take advantage of flexible consumption and strategic vendor partnerships to promote agility and ensure that the business, and its digital infrastructure, can continue to perform in the face of a wide range of unexpected scenarios – social, geopolitical, economic, climate, or business related.

"Digital infrastructure spans compute, storage, network, and infrastructure software, including virtualization and containers, and the automation, AI/ML analytics, and security software and cloud services needed to maintain and optimize both legacy and modern applications and data," explained Mary Johnston Turner, Research VP, Future of Digital Infrastructure. "IDC's 2022 predictions for the future of digital infrastructure identify critical shifts in governance, operations, architecture, and sourcing that need to be factored into enterprise digital transformation strategies going forward."

The top 10 predictions from the Worldwide Future of Digital Infrastructure 2022 report are:

Prediction 1

By 2023, G2000 leaders will prioritize business objectives over infrastructure choice, deploying 50% of new strategic workloads using vendor-specific APIs that add value but reduce workload portability.

Prediction 2

In 2023, over 80% of the G2000 will cite business resiliency to drive verifiable infrastructure supply chain integrity as a mandatory and non-negotiable vendor evaluation criterion.

Prediction 3

By 2023, most C-suite leaders will implement business critical KPIs tied to data availability, recovery, and stewardship as rising levels of cyber-attacks expose the scale of data at risk.

Prediction 4

By 2024, 75% of G2000 digital infrastructure RFPs will require vendors to prove progress on ESG/Sustainability initiatives with data, as CIOs rely on infrastructure vendors to help meet ESG goals.

Prediction 5

By 2024, due to an explosion of edge data, 65% of the G2000 will embed edge-first data stewardship, security, and network practices into data protection plans to integrate edge data into relevant processes.

Prediction 6

By 2025, a 6x explosion in high dependency workloads leads to 65% of G2000 firms using consistent architectural governance frameworks to ensure compliance reporting and audit of their infrastructure.

Prediction 7

By 2025, 60% of enterprises will fund LOB and IT projects through OPEX budgets, matching how vendors provide their services with a focus on outcomes that are determined by SLAs and KPIs.

Prediction 8

By 2025, 70% of companies will invest in alternative computing technologies to drive business differentiation by compressing time to value of insights from complex data sets.

Prediction 9

By 2026, 90% of G2000 CIOs will use AIOps solutions to drive automated remediation and workload placement decisions that include cost and performance metrics, improving resiliency and agility.

Prediction 10

By 2026, mid-market companies will shift 65% of infrastructure spending from traditional channels towards more app-centric trusted advisors.

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AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

An overwhelming majority of IT leaders (95%) believe the upcoming wave of AI-powered digital transformation is set to be the most impactful and intensive seen thus far, according to The Science of Productivity: AI, Adoption, And Employee Experience, a new report from Nexthink ...

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