The maturity ladder
Arguably, to move up the maturity ladder, organizations embracing the accelerated march towards ever more digital transformation need reliable wide area networks to and from their data centers, and between them and their homeworking employees.
The trouble is that Info-Tech’s study finds that 48 percent of organizations rate their IT departments at a low level of maturity. In fact, despite the need to drive growth, only 50 percent of IT practitioners described their maturity as being at a ‘transform’ stage. A significant number of them added that they are struggling. However, Info-Tech says that most IT departments fall within the optimize and support levels of maturity.
Info-Tech explains: “CIOs at the “optimize” level can play a role in digital transformation by improving back-office processes, but should aim for a higher mandate. CIOs achieving at the “expand” level can help directly improve revenues by improving customer-facing products and services; and those at the “transform” level can help fundamentally change the business to create revenue in new ways. CIOs can climb the maturity ladder by enabling new digital capabilities.”
According to Gartner, the strategic trends for 2022 will be focused on: Data Fabric, Cybersecurity Mesh, Privacy-Enhancing Computation, Cloud-Native Platforms, Composable Applications, Decision Intelligence, Hyper-automation, AI Engineering, Distributed Enterprises, Total Experience, Autonomic Systems and Generative AI. The question is about what’s actually new. All of these trends will be reliant on having efficient, secure networks. Another common factor is that new names are created quite often year after year for old technologies that need a marketing boost to create sales growth.
Maturity may be defined by how well organizations are implementing artificial intelligence (AI) and, during 2022, there will be a steady increase in AI and machine learning (ML) pilots. Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are increasingly seen as the glue for AI and ML projects.
Info-Tech explains: “In the past 18 months, API adoption has exploded and, even industries previously considered as digital laggards, are now integrating them to reinvent back-office processes. Technology platforms specializing in API management are attracting record-breaking investment. And sophisticated technology services, such as artificial intelligence, are being delivered by APIs.”
However, despite Forbes reporting that $500,000 was invested in API companies in 2016, and the fact that this investment has grown – according to Info-Tech – to $2bn, optimism is cautious. Some industries are piloting AI and ML projects more than others. There is, nevertheless, recognition that these technologies will eventually impact their businesses in some way, shape or form.
Networks-as-a-Service (NaaS)
In terms of networks, Cisco comments: “The convergence of business needs, emerging technologies and changing IT operations expectations, is creating the perfect storm for the emergence of networks that are delivered and consumed using an as-a-service model.” It believes that the trends for 2022 will therefore require or lead organizations to extending security to a remote workforce; supporting the safe return to on-premises workspaces; facilitating multi-cloud for greater resilience; faster recovery with automated operations; and smarter insights with network analytics.
Cisco says it conducted interviews with 20 IT leaders and received input from more than 1,500 IT professionals in 13 countries about their views on NaaS and how they see it aligning with or augmenting their networking strategies over the next two years. Interestingly, it found that the biggest technology challenges involved connectivity to multiple clouds (36 percent), securing the network, users and applications (34 percent). It also found that 75 percent of organizations either agree or strongly agree that NaaS will lead to the upskilling of IT professionals.
WAN Acceleration
A technology that is achieving increased recognition is WAN Acceleration, which can support all of the above technologies, as well as SD-WANs. It is unique in the way that it mitigates latency and packet loss while improving bandwidth utilization. WAN Acceleration uses artificial intelligence, machine learning, data parallelization and data flows are securely automated. Improving the performance of SD-WANs can outperform themselves with a WAN Acceleration overlay. Unlike WAN optimization, it enables encrypted data to be sent at speed.
Christo Briedenhann, CEO of StratIT, explains that the critical success factors to data, data risk management and the data value chain involve the data being stringently protected, while adding value to the end product. organizations need to be able to generate value out of the data that’s both stored and captured. Out of date data may not add any value, and so it must be updated to make sure that it stays relevant, as well as able to create value. In certain industries, such as in e-commerce, data has to be updated in real-time to ensure that the big data analysis is accurate and makes the right predictions or offers to ensure that the right products are offered, or the right solutions are provided.
David Trossell, CEO and CTO of Bridgeworks, explains why it’s one to watch during 2022: “[Data will remain as crucial as ever in 2022 – perhaps with the increased pace of digitalization, even more so, and with an increased dependency on multi-clouds, AI and machine learning, organizations could significantly benefit from a technology that doesn’t just optimize their WANs. They need to accelerate them for a range of purposes – including backing up their data to achieve regulatory compliance, more accurate big data analysis and for more performant collaboration over networks.”
He argues that WAN acceleration should be part of the toolkit to expand IT’s maturity for strategic growth in 2022 because it doesn’t require organizations to replace their existing infrastructure. It can support the trends highlighted in this article, and it minimizes human involvement to the extent that it can allow IT staff to focus on other strategic projects.
Without an efficient and reliable network, no maturity can essentially be achieved because the digital economy is increasingly dependent on network’s performing at high bandwidth utilization levels, with minimized latency and packet loss. It should therefore be considered as one of the technologies to watch in the New Year.
Click here to read the entire article on IT Pro Portal
