The significance of IT infrastructure, continuity, and transformation for a future-ready organisation

The unprecedented year that 2020 was called for rapid business agility and shifted perceptions about the need for technology adoption as a means for future-readiness.

The COVID-19 crisis presented humanity with the challenge of all operations being handled off-premise. Enterprises initially could not access their on-premise data centres while organisations in general needed to find simplified solutions to manage their data and workloads with utmost speed, efficiency, and cost optimisation.

Today, businesses of all sizes are looking at the adoption of all things digital in a new light and will continue to work with them even in a post-COVID world.

BFSI, Healthcare, Education, Manufacturing, and Retail are some sectors that are undergoing rapid adoptions as they require robust IT infrastructure to support the seamless operational demands of the new world. Millions of Indian SMEs and MSMEs will also benefit from automation and digital technologies as they try to come up to speed with larger enterprises in the global supply chain. 

Quality innovation, simplified technology, and cost efficiency will be imperative to enable technology adoption in building a digitally savvy, progressive, and self-reliant economy. IT infrastructure, IT continuity, and IT transformation solutions like cloud services, data-centre services, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, edge computing, and disaster recovery are emerging as essential technologies to help organisations ride the wave of digital transformation. 

Cloud services are at the heart of modern-day IT infrastructure, the scope and benefits of which many organisations were unaware of until now. Be it cloud adoption or data back-up to cloud, the relevance to modern business comes without a shadow of doubt.

While cloud has become commoditised in the last few years, its adoption is necessitated to continue being relevant in present times and the future. However, public cloud computing platforms are highly beneficial as they provide flexibility, scalability, speed, security, simplicity of usage, and resource sharing. They lock in the application to their proprietary platforms.

Technologies developed on open stack are uniquely equipped to help users adopt cloud services at value-based price points and high performance. With subscription and pay-per-use models, a wider base of users will benefit, thereby democratising cloud usage.

The Indian government is adopting open source software and open standards to ensure that they are protected for the long term. Enterprises are now exploring options to adopt open source for their agile digital initiatives.

Along with the increasing complexity of maintaining a sure-fire IT infrastructure comes need for standardisation, central repository for data documentation, and organisational efficiencies, which can be a capital-intensive exercise.

In such a scenario, data centre services would be a one-stop-shop for enterprises across scale as they significantly bring down the costs involved in having an on-site infrastructure and, at the same time, extend robust IT support and expertise of the service provider. Furthermore, they help cater to the needs of an organisation by customising solutions, be it infrastructure, storage, or security in an efficient and cost-effective manner.

Disaster recovery and data security has become critical for business’ IT continuity as with human immobility, data security and recovery requires a reliable digital system. While setting up one’s own infrastructure could be capital intensive, signing up for disaster recovery as a service would aid enterprises to efficiently handle data crisis in a seamless and cost-effective way.

AI and ML are vital for an organisation to leap into its next phase of evolution with IT transformation. AI and Machine Learning are already acting as catalysts in that journey for many businesses. Fundamentally, AI aids discovery of more human-like solutions to complicated business problems, which may not require human intervention.

Entities that use AI technologies will become diverse, with capability to analyse data through various functionalities, fraud detection, and have good customer service, giving them a strategic edge.

On the other hand, Machine Learning is a part of AI, which operates on the premise that computers can learn from data, recognise patterns, and make decisions with little to no human input. Enterprises can utilise human brains for more innovative and relevant areas of work.

It is now time for moving application closer to the consumer. Edge computing involves capturing, storing, processing, and analysing the data near the end consumer, making it an important cog in the wheel for an enterprise’s IT transformation.

Data processing at the edge is close to the source and enables analytics and AI capabilities to be rapidly applied as it significantly improves the time required to make any decision. This is critical for many cases that have dependency on real-time decisions. It also significantly reduces costs and makes operations swift, timely, and efficient.

The spread of COVID-19 has led to a gradual increase of reliance on automated solutions to business problems, thus making it imperative for entities to adopt more advanced technologies with time. Such solutions offer a great degree of transparency, return of productivity, and cost-effectiveness, which in turn, allows entities to function more proficiently and be future-ready.