Tata Communications : Will 2018 finally be the year enterprises became truly ...

In the rapidly-changing digital landscape enterprises should keep up with the latest technology trends and make right decisions faster to set themselves up for a future that has already begun.

The word 'intelligent' is something that managers in corporations and various enterprises hear frequently these days. It is without a doubt that trends such as machine learning, artificial general intelligence, data driven decision making and processes, smart contracts, virtual/augmented reality and intelligent infrastructure can benefit your average business out there - the question many ask though is how these trends would manifest in organisations in the short term.

Intelligent infrastructure: from build to consume

There is a clear shift happening from building IT to consuming IT, with public cloud infrastructure seeing the greatest growth in adoption. According to a recent McKinsey research, by 2020 it is expected that up to 80% of enterprise applications will be in the public cloud with only the remaining 20% in their own data centre.

Migrating to hybrid cloud enables your company to achieve cost efficiency, flexibility, scalability and more deployment options. On top of it, off-premise solutions eliminate the need to make massive financial expenditures to handle short-term spikes in demand, as well as helping you free up local resources for more sensitive processes or applications.

Applying an intelligent approach allows you (but more importantly your competitors) to use smart hybrid infrastructure to innovate, automate and increase the speed of business. Smart hybrid cloud uses machine learning and comes together with intelligent infrastructure, customisation, personalisation, a multi-cloud ecosystem, integrated managed services as well as transparency.

The rising importance of integration and interoperability

The future of enterprise IT lies in the intelligent cloud. Having the right cloud strategy for infrastructure, applications or data on its own is no longer enough to tackle tomorrow's business challenges, unless your organisation can efficiently connect these systems in a way that provides predictive information that ultimately leads to more intelligent business actions. The underlying goal of this next phase of cloud computing is to achieve and leverage the full potential of the entire hybrid cloud landscape, by squeezing the most out the insights obtained from digitised business process that no longer operate in isolated silos.

Normally, when companies shift to virtual data storage and computing in the cloud, they are just taking their first big step towards a much bigger transformation: cloud enabled intelligence.

Intelligent cloud: a key to the future of technology

Datasets that businesses collect from their IT systems are so large and complex that they always seem to warrant a rethink of the KPIs and rely on virtualisation and cloud deployment models that can help enterprises get smarter in their decision making. The intelligent cloud is a platform shift towards data which automates a wider range of processes and knowledge tasks in a smart way and at a lower cost. It provides services equipped with robust and intelligent mechanisms that enable them to respond to external inputs and users in an autonomous, smart self-sustainable manner. In other words, you can call it a 'problem-solving' cloud which connects and analyses big data to take the best possible action in each situation.

Infrastructure automation enables you to respond to rapid changes

At its core, the digital era is all about speed. Everything needs to go faster - from application development cycles to customer service to managing incidents and other internal issues in near real-time. Business outcomes, customer loyalty and competitive advantage all rely on the speed of business processes. Since your business can only go as fast as your infrastructure, it is important to speed it up by automating processes.

Intelligent cloud solutions help you automate most of your business processes to achieve productivity, business agility, cut labour cost, optimise the workforce, and improve the user experience. When you combine machine learning capabilities with a smart automated solution, you can accomplish far more than you may have ever imagined.

Secure end-to-end cloud management

Managing operations, maximising resources, and executing projects in hybrid environments remains a stress point, mostly due to the lack of experience, loss of visibility and control, as there is no single touch point for deployments. To make the migration run smoothly and create an intelligent cloud-first culture successfully, more and more enterprises go for end-to-end cloud management solutions. Having a partner who will design, integrate and manage hybrid cloud services while maximising its benefits becomes a must. With the right partner, achieving both efficiency and innovation in all the business domains and applications across the entire portfolio is much easier.

How much of it is just hype?

'All of it, and none of it.' Would be the simple answer - in reality many of these changes will be adopted gradually as IT companies come up with better and better technological solutions for the real life problems that businesses are facing. However, as exchange of information between the digital and real world continues to accelerate and the companies that can get insights from the wealth of data better and faster will be the winners of the future.

Join a webinar on 31^st January 2018 with Tata Communications and Microsoft on how to get the most out of your IT department in the age of the intelligent enterprise.