Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 53 | Page 28

INFOGRAPHIC Hybrid multi-cloud adoption leads to pressure to modernise infrastructure Atish Gude, Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer (CSO), NetApp, tells us the move from onpremise environments can unintentionally open the door to increased IT complexity. 2019 was a year of rapid innovation and disruption for both the IT industry and the broader business community. With the widespread adoption of hybrid multi-cloud as the de facto architecture for enterprise customers, organisations everywhere are under tremendous pressure to modernise their infrastructure and to deliver tangible business value around dataintensive applications and workloads. As a result, organisations are shifting from onpremises environments to using public cloud services, building private clouds and moving from disk to flash in data centres – sometimes concurrently. These transformations open the door to enormous potential, but they also introduce the unintended consequence of increased IT complexity. We predict that a demand for simplicity and customisability will be the number one factor that drives IT purchasing decisions in 2020. Vendors will need to offer modern, flexible technologies with the choice of how to use and to consume those technologies so that customers can keep pace with their evolving business models. As IT departments strive to de-emphasise maintenance and hardware, to reduce overheads, and to adopt pay-as-you-go models, simplicity and choice will be crucial. Achieving this simplicity will serve as the foundation for companies as they navigate the exciting technological trends that we identify in the following sections. 1. As the advent of 5G makes AI-driven Internet of Things (IoT) a reality, Edge Computing environments are primed to become even more disruptive than cloud was. In preparation for the widespread emergence of 5G, lower-cost sensors and maturing AI applications will be used to build compute-intensive Edge environments. This effort will lay the groundwork for highbandwidth, low-latency AI-driven IoT environments with the potential for huge innovation and disruption. 28 INTELLIGENTCIO www.intelligentcio.com