By: Taj ElKhayat, Regional Vice President, Middle East and Africa at Riverbed Technology
In 2016, Middle East enterprises went through one of the biggest transitions in a decade as they began to embark on their digital transformation journeys. Characterized by growing uptake of third-platform, enterprise mobility and big-data initiatives, all supported by increasingly complex hybrid networking infrastructures, this necessary evolution has not been without its challenges for businesses in the region.
Now as the digital transformation continues to steam head in 2017, Riverbed Technology provides the following list of trends and predictions to help organizations better plan their IT strategies for the year ahead.
Enterprises Move Toward a Strategic Architecture for Digital Transformation
IDC predicts that, by 2017, 60% of digital transformation initiatives will be unable to scale due to a lack of a strategic architecture. And by 2018, 70% of siloed digital transformation initiatives will ultimately fail due to insufficient collaboration, integration, sourcing, or project management. Research from MIT Sloan Management and Deloitte University Press concurs.
They found that less-mature digital companies tend to take a tactical, piecemeal approach as they solve discrete business problems with individual digital technologies. As a result, they don’t fully integrate digital technologies with their business operations, don’t solve the underlying infrastructure problems that cause frequent application performance issues across the enterprise, and fail to deliver the required technical capabilities at scale.
Prediction: Enterprises will realize that, for application, compute, storage, and networking infrastructure to work optimally, it all must work together, seamlessly, as a system. Any point of weakness or failure anywhere in the infrastructure can make the whole system fail. Thus, a strategic architecture must extend across the enterprise and unite all the components into a seamless, software-defined system delivering high-performing applications, data, and services.
Everything Becomes Software-Defined
Whether it is compute, storage or networking, you can see increased impact and adoption of software-defined everything. In the software-defined world, management and control of computing environment, storage and networking is automated by intelligent software and not by the hardware components.
Prediction: Enterprise organizations will implement technologies that ensure agility, visibility and performance in order to transition more and more to a software-defined enterprise.
Transformation Drives Next Wave of Cloud
Enterprise-level internal resources including business-critical applications are now being moved to the cloud. This is a new development as internal-facing applications are traditionally kept internal. The challenge with migrating old systems and applications to a newer encrypted approach is that the network capabilities can be stretched thin or become too fragile. This ultimately creates complexities tied to application planning, performance monitoring and final migration to the cloud.
Prediction: Digital transformation isn’t a fad and we expect to see the migration of critical applications to the cloud increase in 2017 across all markets. Large enterprise clouds are now being adopted beyond just customer-facing resources like eCommerce websites. Having visibility is important in order to understand how things are being influenced as organizations change the digital landscape. Cloud-only and internet-only transport are the future as they allow enterprise organizations to become more nimble and agile, while also providing cost savings.
Visibility Creates a Competitive Advantage for the Hybrid Enterprise
After deploying a hybrid environment, which can be complex and difficult to manage, the work is just beginning for the enterprise. The process continues as application requirements and business needs evolve. So, to increase agility, IT is always evaluating and adopting cloud services and related technologies like PaaS, containers and micro-services to deliver applications faster. IT organizations will keep an eye on the longer-term to ensure that they can scale as usage increases.
Prediction: We expect to see greater adoption of application and network management functionality to ensure visibility into the hybrid cloud creating more trust in IT and alignment to business objectives.
Cloud Visibility Becomes Critical to Success of DevOps Approach to Digital Services
DevOps teams are increasingly using the cloud’s PaaS capabilities together with third-party components to develop composite applications faster. According to Sonatype, the average enterprise downloads more than 229,000 components annually, of which one in 16 has security defects. Third-party components account for 80% – 90% of the code in a typical enterprise application today. Current monitoring for components traces app transactions through server interactions, which obscures dependencies within the app layer.
Prediction: Enterprises will seek new solutions that provide clear visibility into the behavior and interaction of third-party components and platforms in cloud-based environments in order to accelerate development of apps and digital services in the cloud, proactively prevent performance issues, and improve performance of cloud-based apps.
