Written by Sandeep Bhargava, Global Head, Services and Solutions, Public Cloud Business Unit, Rackspace Technology
As the IT landscape evolves over the second half of 2023, we can expect organisations to intensify their focus on cloud transformation projects toward the goals of increased efficiency, better near-term returns on investment (ROI), and accelerated innovation.
Our survey of more than 1,400 decision-makers revealed that businesses are becoming more savvy when it comes to their tech investment strategies. Organisations are taking the time to review and assess their investments to ensure the efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and innovativeness of their cloud transformation projects.
For the rest of 2023, enterprises will continue to benefit from the following trends that are spurring investments in technology and digital transformation:
- The commoditisation of artificial intelligence (AI)
- The adoption of more sophisticated data management models
- Infrastructure resiliency
Let us take a closer look at each:
1. The commoditisation of AI. We will see continued growth in AI across all business areas. AI use cases, projects, and investments will continue to grow across multiple industries as companies look to maximise resources and optimise operations. The continued evolution of AI, as evidenced by ChatGPT’s mainstream adoption, will drive the incorporation of AI-driven decision support as an integral part of many products and solutions. This, in turn, will pave the path for the commoditisation of AI.
Singapore’s government has been driving AI adoption with use cases such as the utilisation of computer vision for detecting contraband in maritime and air cargo, as well as natural language processing to combat websites engaged in phishing and other cybercrimes.
With an uncertain economic climate, as shown by the 0.7 percent contraction of the economy from the fourth quarter of 2022 to the first quarter of 2023, businesses must have their AI projects pay off. A well-developed FinOps program is critical for this, paving the way for success in even the most challenging environments.
2. Strategic data management. Chief data officers (CDOs) will continue to focus on balancing data protection and data utilisation strategies. Analytics and transformational processes are critical to driving growth in the second half of the year, making data reliability crucial. Without good data, strategies for both growth and risk mitigation will have difficulty taking off.
3. Infrastructure resiliency and platform engineering. Organisations will continue to shore up the resilience of business-critical initiatives. This will require modernising their infrastructure and platforms to enable the stability, scale, security, repeatability, and reliability of their deployments. According to our latest survey, 78% of Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) respondents agree they will not benefit from AI if they fail to modernise legacy apps and data. Respondents indicated that the top expected outcomes of modernising are increased efficiency, cost savings and the ability to adopt more advanced technologies. The importance of platform engineering will continue to grow as businesses seek to optimise their engineering efficiency.
Teams will continue to leverage automation and abstraction to help their organisations adopt new technologies and codify policies and practices governing their usage. Companies will keep building their platform engineering capabilities to surpass DevOps by the end of the year.
Efficient, cost-effective, and innovative
Cloud transformation projects are crucial for businesses to remain competitive for the rest of the year and beyond. As companies review their IT strategies and investments, the commoditisation of AI, strategic data management, infrastructure resiliency, and platform engineering should be their primary focus for the year. Through these areas, businesses can improve their ROI through increased efficiency and accelerated innovation.
