CIO OPINION
As the transition from virtualisation to
cloud-native and containerised applications
gathers momentum, there will be an
increasing focus on seamless private/public
cloud application and data mobility through
to 2020. Those technologies which are
able to integrate security with performance
and multi-tenancy to enable this mobility
on-demand, will become the market and
mind-share leaders. is near impossible with systems that take
days to back-up, index or restore data. To
get to the stage where this level of control
and safeguarding is possible we are going
to see significant investment during 2018
in faster networks, search and indexing.
Tools and platforms to improve the
visibility, manageability and performance
of data pipelines in general will also see
substantial investment.
Being able to efficiently migrate and
repatriate data is going to be a key feature
of cloud capability as organisations review
the splits between where applications and
data are most advantageously hosted from
both a legal and operational perspective. That said, organisations that rely on
technology alone for GDPR compliance
will struggle. There will also be significant
cultural and procedural changes needed to
achieve and maintain GDPR compliance.
The right cultural approaches need to be
led by senior management and the right
tools need to be implemented to support
that behaviour. IT can help but it has to be
part of an end-to-end approach, starting
with the data architect and permeating the
organisation from the back office through to
every customer facing representative.
“
DATA IS NOW
A CURRENCY,
BUT ONE WHICH
CARRIES EXTRA
RESPONSIBILITY
FOR THE HOLDER.
Returning data to centralised pools in
each legislative region is likely to become
more common. This will increasingly be
augmented (even at the edge) by directly
linked high performance storage and
compute at a local level, for mission critical
real time or highly sensitive applications.
Data stewardship must become a
core competency in 2018
IT and culture must change to support
that GDPR implementation is imminent,
and for some organisations the initial
cost of compliance will be substantial. It
fundamentally requires companies to be
good data stewards. That means knowing
and showing where personal data is, where it
is not and demonstrating fine grained data
control from ingestion to deletion.
Becoming an exemplary data steward or
responding effectively to security incidents,
50
INTELLIGENTCIO
Leveraging AI and Machine Learning
Data from Forrester suggests that 70% of
enterprises expect to implement some form
of AI over the next year. However, I believe
that, across the full range of businesses,
the benefits of Machine Learning (ML) are
going to be felt more immediately. ML’s
quick wins will be lower down in the business
technology stack. ML based automation is
already proven to save hours each day in the
routine administration of IT infrastructure.
Instrumenting systems, via the Internet of
Things, and using ML to analyse the data,
delivers valuable, actionable information
which can be used to automatically resolve
issues before they have a business impact.
In my discussions with customers, several
have equated the automation and guidance
provided by ML based systems with having
an additional infrastructure engineer on staff
24/7. This frees up IT staff to invest time in
making use of the data they are storing and
securing for their organisations.
Storage conversations should
become data conversations
Technically, and commercially, the problem
of delivering high performance, robust,
simple and scalable storage has been solved.
2018 will be seen as a tipping point, where
automation and orchestration technologies
abstract modern infrastructure technology
operations into a REST API call from Ansible,
Chef, Puppet, Kubernetes etc.
Developers can now be given access to
the block, file and object storage that they
need, on a common scalable platform,
with certainty over performance and
on-going, non-disruptive enhancement of
the underlying technology. They no longer
www.intelligentcio.com