By Aaron White, VP and GM of Sales, Nutanix APJ
The last 12 months brought about an unprecedented surge of technology and innovation. The importance of the cloud and the growing preference for a hybrid infrastructure was reinforced as a business imperative. The digital-first world we live in today is enabled largely by the cloud. To deliver data and insights even faster, the edge also emerged as a key differentiator for organisations. However, the hottest commodity was AI. Overnight, it dominated conversations. Most organisations hopped on the AI train, to different extents, with immediacy and a suitcase of uncertainty.
However, amidst the deluge of new technologies emerging at breakneck speeds, and a sense of urgency to adopt these innovations, business decision-makers are starting to find themselves overwhelmed with new solutions. It increasingly feels like technology is happening to people rather than for them. While AI will continue to dominate conversations, organisations need to take a quick step back and put in place a strong cloud strategy that will pave the way for their journey. It will be crucial to understand their
technology stack, focus efforts on (re)building customer trust, and cultivate the skills that will allow workers to keep up with the demands of an ever-evolving digital landscape.
Hybrid multicloud will become the default choice for enterprises
Adoption of cloud services across all industries and regions has accelerated and will continue to. Gartner predicts that, by 2025, 75 percent of enterprise data will be created and processed outside the traditional data centre or cloud, up from a mere 10 per cent in 2018.
Organisations have sought to enable a variety of applications, enhance business agility, and optimise costs. Despite this surge, not every workload seamlessly aligns with the public cloud, and many enterprises grapple with legacy applications and data entrenched in on-premises or private cloud environments. Therefore, hybrid multicloud solutions that offer the best of both worlds will become the default choice for enterprises that want to balance performance, security, compliance, and cost. According to the Nutanix 2023 ECI report, 86 per cent of IT decision-makers in APJ expect hybrid cloud to positively impact their businesses in 2024.
On top of all this with the ever-expanding digital frontier, and as AI takes root in everyday operations, the inevitability of the hybrid multi cloud as the default choice becomes a catalyst for transformative change. It not only addresses immediate challenges but positions organisations to thrive amidst the uncertainties of tomorrow. The ongoing journey toward hybrid multi cloud adoption represents a strategic paradigm shift—one where adaptability, resilience, and innovation collide to redefine the very fabric of modern enterprise IT.
Trust: Overcoming uncertainty and promoting innovation
The last couple of years have been marked by rapid technological advancements and unprecedented disruptions, and overcoming uncertainty is paramount for sustained success. Nearly 73 percent of mid and large-sized organisations in India were hit by a ransomware attack in 2023, a survey by cybersecurity firm Sophos has revealed.
Ransomware continues to be major challenge for many countries and organisations. According to a DSCI & Seqrite report, ransomware evades traditional signature-based detection techniques to pose a bigger threat which is evident in the Malware vs Ransomware incident ratio findings. This showcases how ransomware remains the most destructive cybercrime threat for India Inc.
Thus, as the technology sector continues to evolve and innovate, trust will be a potent catalyst, allowing organisations to unlock the full potential of their teams to explore new ideas and take calculated risks. With technology providers continuing to invest in AI and ML solutions and services, it will be essential to embed security, privacy, and transparency into their systems as they are being built.
Skilled workforce: Empowering digital innovation
While technology is advancing at lightning speed, the shortage of skilled professionals across Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) capable of harnessing new and emerging technologies poses a significant hurdle. Previous reports estimate that APJ will see the demand for skilled workers in cloud computing grow by more than three-fold through 2025. In India, the tech industry is projected to experience a revenue growth of $245 billion in the fiscal year 2023, contributing an additional $19 billion in revenue and generating approximately 290,000 jobs during the same period, as per a Nasscom report.
With the speed of innovation, it might be difficult to predict what skills will be needed over the next few years. However, one thing is certain: we’ll need to start building education into our workflows to upskill and reskill the current workforce to keep pace with evolving business requirements. Academic programs also need to evolve and ensure that students are being equipped with the right knowledge and skill sets for entering the workforce.
While training should be a fundamental tool and requirement, there is also a need for organisations to place more emphasis on skills, in addition to university degrees, to fully unlock the potential of their future technology workforce. According to the India Skill Report 2023, there has been a noteworthy enhancement in the overall employability of young individuals, rising from 46.2 percent to 50.3 percent this year. The employability of women in the workforce has shown significant growth, reaching 52.8 percent, surpassing the employability rate of men, which stands at 47.2 percent. This trend holds promising implications for India's economic growth, suggesting that harnessing the demographic dividend could potentially lead to a doubling of the GDP by 2030, from the current figure of more than US$3 trillion.
We are standing at the precipice of this transformative year – a journey toward resilience, innovation, and sustainability. As organisations take stock of the last 12 months and the tech odyssey that we’ve been on, it is time now to take full advantage of the innovation. Having the right technology partner, skills, and talent, will be crucial as we take off to new technological heights.