Building resilience: Five trends that define future-ready firms

By Puneet Gupta

An organisation’s capacity to access relevant data in a secure, actionable manner has become as important as its cash flow, balance sheet, or market share strategy, and other traditional indicators of business performance. An enterprise’s performance is increasingly defined by its ability to deliver individual and personalized experiences. The ones that do this best with a customer-first approach will see themselves thriving in the new normal. This also means that the enterprises will have to quickly reconfigure business structures and capabilities based on new technologies. In the long run, this will help them meet future customer and employee needs with adaptivity, creativity, and resilience.

With IT innovations redefining the workplace and hybrid workplaces continuing to gain momentum, organisations will further experiment with software-defined solutions such as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). There will be increased demand for infrastructure as a service and other hybrid multi-cloud services.

The following trends will differentiate future-ready firms from legacy organisations in 2022:

Cloud-native platforms: Large organisations will move decisively away from a lift-and-shift approach to the cloud, embracing cloud-native technologies instead. Having watched the hyperscalers up-end industries across verticals, enterprises will accelerate their move to cloud-scale applications to meet their competitive challenges.

Data privacy and security: If data is a genuine asset, can it be secured, insured, and graded in terms of value and/or usage? How should this asset be quantified and valued on the balance sheet? Data economics will be the science that will help companies define their expertise in the collection, storage, deployment and use of this data. The increasing importance of data will also make data security and reliability top priorities for both companies and consumers alike.

5G: We are increasingly seeing players in the technology industry and business community invest in building edge-computing environments to support AI-driven IoT. The advances it will bring—everything from self-driving cars and smart cities, to connected healthcare and industrial IoT, will truly revolutionise every sector and open new avenues for businesses across regions. 5G, with its machine-to-machine connectivity, will lead to an exponential increase in data. How enterprises leverage this data is what will define their future success.

The rise of sustainable technology in India: In 2022, the demand for sustainability-related services powered by edge and IoT will grow in the areas of energy efficiency and resource management. Use cases for technologies like this will be environmental monitoring, resource management and supply chain processes.

AI driving intelligent data management: Data is only as good as the AI systems used to manage, regulate, and mine it for insights. The work that many organizations continued in 2021 with new use cases for AI, will continue to expand as businesses realise the power that AI can hold for solving problems better, faster, and at scale.

As Covid-19 continues to present new challenges for IT professionals across sectors with many enterprises still working from home, we can expect to see these trends continue in 2022 and well beyond, as the global economy settles into changes that may indeed become permanent.

The writer is managing director and vice-president, India/Saarc, NetApp