THREE FOCUSED TRACKS
DATA CENTRE
The data centre remains the heart of any business. It is critical to the delivery of IT services, connecting and providing storage for a growing number of devices, users and workloads, which are producing more data than ever before. The modern, heterogeneous data centre has changed significantly from what it was a few years ago in technology advancements, complexity and scale.
Optimising the data centre is crucial, and designing and planning a data centre strategy is becoming more and more complex in the increasingly digital world. Enterprises are faced with some hard choices: should they modernise their old data centre, co-locate, build or lease a new one, or look to the cloud?
While the proliferation of data is nothing new, what’s changing is the way it’s managed. Many organisations are now moving workloads to increasingly complex hybrid-environments made up of on-premises systems and public clouds. And while these systems are dispersed, they still need perform at their peak. Other organisations are looking to software-defined storage (SDS) to address the performance and availability challenges caused by the data explosion.
DEVOPS
DevOps has been redefined over the past two years, and its value and benefits are finally being recognised. Its ability to boost an organisation’s competitive edge and enhance its offerings means it’s being viewed as a panacea by IT leaders who are tasked with shortening the systems development life cycle while delivering features, fixes, and updates timeously. And it goes without saying that these all need to align with the business objectives. For CIOs who want to improve the efficiency of their systems and drive innovation, DevOps, and the speed, agility and economies of scale it brings, is no longer a case of ‘if’ but ‘how’.
The DevOps methodology has now begun to surpass software development and delivery, and its framework is showing itself to be a true enabler that allows IT teams to build, develop and operate resilient systems at scale that can evolve rapidly.
CLOUD
There’s no question that almost every organisation in the world uses cloud technologies to keep up and running. It has become the de facto way by which services are consumed, and businesses across the private and public sector are looking to capitalise on the innovation it promises. The problem is, many of them don't know how.
In the next few years, cloud computing is set to experience profound advancement and change. Alongside the big cloud computing and storage providers, there’s the IOT, AI and the edge, and we can expect to see an increase in the number of vendors offering tailored cloud services, allowing organisations to harness cloud capabilities for particular workloads that would normally require purpose-built applications. Security will remain a major challenge, and the types of cloud we see today, private, public, multi and hybrid will continue to be split into myriad cloud categories.
