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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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The prevention of data center outages continues to be a strategic priority for data center owners and operators. Infrastructure equipment has improved, but the complexity of modern architectures and evolving external threats presents new risks that operators must actively manage, according to the Data Center Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute ...

As observability engineers, we navigate a sea of telemetry daily. We instrument our applications, configure collectors, and build dashboards, all in pursuit of understanding our complex distributed systems. Yet, amidst this flood of data, a critical question often remains unspoken, or at best, answered by gut feeling: "Is our telemetry actually good?" ... We're inviting you to participate in shaping a foundational element for better observability: the Instrumentation Score ...

We're inching ever closer toward a long-held goal: technology infrastructure that is so automated that it can protect itself. But as IT leaders aggressively employ automation across our enterprises, we need to continuously reassess what AI is ready to manage autonomously and what can not yet be trusted to algorithms ...

Much like a traditional factory turns raw materials into finished products, the AI factory turns vast datasets into actionable business outcomes through advanced models, inferences, and automation. From the earliest data inputs to the final token output, this process must be reliable, repeatable, and scalable. That requires industrializing the way AI is developed, deployed, and managed ...

Almost half (48%) of employees admit they resent their jobs but stay anyway, according to research from Ivanti ... This has obvious consequences across the business, but we're overlooking the massive impact of resenteeism and presenteeism on IT. For IT professionals tasked with managing the backbone of modern business operations, these numbers spell big trouble ...

For many B2B and B2C enterprise brands, technology isn't a core strength. Relying on overly complex architectures (like those that follow a pure MACH doctrine) has been flagged by industry leaders as a source of operational slowdown, creating bottlenecks that limit agility in volatile market conditions ...

FinOps champions crucial cross-departmental collaboration, uniting business, finance, technology and engineering leaders to demystify cloud expenses. Yet, too often, critical cost issues are softened into mere "recommendations" or "insights" — easy to ignore. But what if we adopted security's battle-tested strategy and reframed these as the urgent risks they truly are, demanding immediate action? ...

Two in three IT professionals now cite growing complexity as their top challenge — an urgent signal that the modernization curve may be getting too steep, according to the Rising to the Challenge survey from Checkmk ...

While IT leaders are becoming more comfortable and adept at balancing workloads across on-premises, colocation data centers and the public cloud, there's a key component missing: connectivity, according to the 2025 State of the Data Center Report from CoreSite ...

A perfect storm is brewing in cybersecurity — certificate lifespans shrinking to just 47 days while quantum computing threatens today's encryption. Organizations must embrace ephemeral trust and crypto-agility to survive this dual challenge ...