In today’s business world, staying competitive in a constantly changing marketplace is challenging. It requires flexibility, agility and scalability, and ultimately depends largely on an enterprise’s ability to quickly adapt and adopt new technologies.
It also requires connections. Connections to customers, connections to the market and industry, and connections to partners and IT ecosystems that can help drive the business forward.
Established businesses cannot afford to be complacent. Most are now competing against more nimble, technology-enabled entrants. As a result, pressure is on to catch up and make changes to legacy IT infrastructure to empower agility and improve efficiency. At the same time, enterprises also have to contend with new and evolving challenges around security, compliance and sustainability. Making changes in this environment is no mean feat.
Why is having the right IT infrastructure important?
If we look back to the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, it was those organisations who had an agile IT infrastructure that were able to reap the benefits early. Now with hybrid and dispersed working here to stay, more and more enterprises are looking to distributed IT infrastructure as the answer, allowing them to utilise high-speed and low-latency interconnections between cloud, colocation and edge computing.
Success is dependent on having the right connections to improve, efficiency and accelerate speed to market. Those that get it wrong will surely be left behind in the race to the connected future.
The benefits of digital transformation
Demands from customers and fierce competition mean that it is now imperative that enterprises operate in the most cost-effective and efficient way. Customers expect to have services on demand and will not tolerate anything less than high-performance. At the same time, enterprises have access to more data than ever before, all of which needs to be converted into useful business insights to enable quicker and more informed decisions.
New and innovative technologies were rapidly being used by enterprises prior to the coronavirus pandemic. However, according to Dell’s Digital Transformation Index 2020, eight in ten organisations fast-tracked their digital transformation programmes in 2020. Our own research last year found that Covid-19 impacted digital transformation efforts for 85% of organisations, with connectivity to services, data security and maintaining uptime the biggest challenges. As a result, 91% said they were planning to make changes to their IT infrastructure following the pandemic, including increasing bandwidth options, shifting more workloads to the cloud and increasing capacity in the data centre. So, as we emerge from the other side, what progress has been made?
The race to the connected future
While much has been written about the challenges facing IT teams and current trends, there is little tangible data to show how different sectors are faring when it comes to IT infrastructure and adoption of core technologies such as colocation, cloud and edge computing.
Ahead of the launch of our newest data centre, Telehouse South and to help us understand this better, we recently commissioned independent research among five key enterprises sectors: financial services, retail, logistics, manufacturing and private healthcare, to see who is winning or losing in the race to the connected future. Here’s a snapshot of some of our findings…
Interestingly, nearly all enterprises feel advanced in their IT maturity, but are under pressure to mature further in order to meet increasing cyber security requirements, demands for more connected and personalised experiences, and the need to increase efficiency.
Many are also not confident in their competitiveness, despite the majority already implementing a strategy for new technology such as edge computing – something that’s still only really on the horizon. Hybrid and private cloud remain the dominant cloud approaches, and colocation is pivotal to success, with nearly all enterprises using it within their business. But data growth is causing issues for many with a third now saying it is a serious problem.
So, what does this mean for enterprises?
The ability to access connected ecosystems will be critical in helping organisations to integrate disparate data types and sources, extend network reach, reduce latency and costs and improve performance as user and infrastructure demands continue to grow. And for enterprises, having the right infrastructure partner – one that can provide the security, resilience, and low-latency connectivity required to drive IT maturity forward – will be critical to success.
To read more of the key findings, download the full Telehouse report “The Race to the Connected Future” here.
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