Innovators and laggards separated by digital infrastructure

International Data Corporation's (IDC) highlights key, impactful trends for the future of digital infrastructure and its top 10 predictions for the next five years.

Digital businesses depend on digital infrastructure - compute and data management horsepower; network connectivity; operational support; and management - to power business applications, analytics, and activities, the analysts state.

IDC's Future of Digital Infrastructure framework provides a model for understanding how a successful digital-first strategy is built on critical digital infrastructure investments across dedicated on-premises data centres, edge locations, and public cloud resources.

Digital infrastructure spans compute, storage, network, infrastructure software (including virtualisation and containers) and the automation, AI/ML analytics, and security software and cloud services needed to maintain and optimise legacy and modern applications and data.

Ecosystem partners, including systems integrators and channel partners, are also important contributors. Organisations that optimise hybrid and multi-cloud digital infrastructure environments consistently realise higher levels of operational resiliency, security, revenue growth, and overall productivity at scale, according to IDC.

Mary Johnston Turner, Research Vice President, Future of Digital Infrastructure, says, "Digital infrastructure provides the underpinning for digital business agility and innovation.

"IDC's 2023 predictions for the future of digital infrastructure identify critical shifts in governance, operations, architecture, and sourcing that need to be factored into enterprise digital transformation strategies going forward."

IDC's top 10 predictions for the future of digital infrastructure are:

Prediction 1: By 2026, 65% of tech buyers will prioritise as-a-service consumption models for infrastructure purchases to help restrain IT spending growth and fill ITOps talent gaps.

Prediction 2: By 2026, 65% of IT organisations will only purchase infrastructure solutions that incorporate predictive cyber-resiliency mechanisms proven to reduce post-cyberintrusion recovery efforts.

Prediction 3: By 2027, AI-enabled automation will ensure consistent digital infrastructure configuration, performance, cost, and security by reducing the need for human operations intervention by 70% and improving SLOs.

Prediction 4: By 2023, amid ongoing IT supply chain disruptions, 80% of G5000 infrastructure customers will adopt proactive multi-sourcing strategies to protect themselves against future IT supply risks.

Prediction 5: By 2024, 40% of digital business apps will depend on contractually guaranteed cross-provider data transfer and operational/financial data sharing agreements between public clouds and on-prem tech partners.

Prediction 6: By 2026, 95% of companies will invest in fit-for-purpose, heterogeneous compute technologies that deliver faster insights from complex data sets to drive differentiated business outcomes.

Prediction 7: By 2025, 70% of the G2000 will prioritise the trusted infrastructure of sovereign clouds to ensure consistent security and local/regional regulatory compliance for specific sensitive workloads and data.

Prediction 8: By 2025, to ensure data and workflow integrations spanning distributed clouds and edge environments, 50% of enterprises will deploy multi-cloud networking, bringing consistency and simplicity to NetOps.

Prediction 9: By 2027, the need for faster, higher-quality data-driven decisions will cause 80% of G2000 CIOs to mandate companywide data logistics strategies for data management, protection, and integration.

Prediction 10: By 2024, due to economic pressures, 50% of G2000 will prioritise infrastructure vendor selections based on tech partner ecosystems that offer cost savings provided by preferred pricing and support deals.