Outlook 2022: Building a resilient digital future

By Faiz Shakir

Over the past 18-plus months, organisational change has been forged by internal and external pressures. Organisations that drove forward with an agile mindset and adopted the right digital technologies to support their teams and customers have seen great returns. Now, on the cusp of a new era, organisations have a brief window for introspection and to consider how they want to operate and fine tune their approach.

Hybrid multicloud, cybersecurity, automation and artificial intelligence are some key technologies that will have a big part to play in increasing customer experience and accelerating business growth in 2022. Here is how four of India’s key sectors will use these technologies as they aim to build a resilient digital future:

BFSI
Recent rapid developments in financial services from newer players and fintechs have challenged the dominance of traditional banks. So, a large focus for all BFSIs will be on transforming their digital customer experiences while retaining, engaging and acquiring new customers. BFSIs will look to automate their manual processes, develop more digital products and deliver better services overall. Modernising their IT infrastructure and applications, and moving to hybrid multicloud solutions will be essential to this model.

IT/ITeS
The hyper-digital transformation witnessed since the pandemic will continue to accelerate as India’s enterprises seek faster, value-driven solutions to secure their workforce, applications and data. IT/ITeS organisations will lean on hybrid multicloud for operational consistency across their workloads, since they will need unified user experiences, policies, security postures and service-level agreements. In the face of an evolving security threat landscape, ‘zero-trust’ will become the defence strategy of choice. And as part of this strategy, security automation will play a large part in constantly protecting an enterprise’s vulnerabilities from external and internal threats both. Finally,enterprises will turn to AI and automation to help their current workforce address operational challenges.

Healthcare
The sector’s ultimate focus is on saving lives, so weeding out any issues that might obstruct from that purpose, especially from an IT standpoint, will be the main goal for 2022. Our last Enterprise Cloud Index report identified that many healthcare organisations have a five-year-plan to switch to hybrid multicloud, and will continue looking at IT more strategically. This architecture will provide CIOs agility, flexibility and control, and also help position the industry for further innovation in areas such as AI, IoT, AR, VR and robotics. All healthcare CXOs will prioritise fortifying their IT environments with the ability to rapidly recover from ransomware attacks.

PSUs/Government
Since these routinely deal with immense volumes of data, data management and cybersecurity, along with an upgraded, scalable infrastructure like hybrid multicloud that can easily support heavy workloads during crucial periods, will remain paramount.
The future enterprise is taking shape, with strong focus on process redesign to improve and simplify work. In 2022, as data further cements its position as the currency of digital businesses, investments in hybrid multicloud, cybersecurity, automation and AI, will help India’s organisations become more resilient.

The writer is managing director – Sales, India & SAARC, Nutanix