I was thrilled to join Digital Transformation Summit (DT23) in Edinburgh recently, where I had the opportunity to join the morning plenary discussion to look at how we embrace innovation and the ideas shaping the future.
We see it through four lenses: cloud, hybrid working, cyber resilience and AI. And the common thread between them all, is data.
With a modernised data foundation, firms can simplify complexity, supercharge productivity, and accelerate innovation across a distributed data landscape. But only a minority has achieved this so far. And it means that all significant transformation projects, in any organisation, must be technology and data-led.
The Cloud: Managing your data
If all companies are data companies. Then to manage that data successfully, it means all companies have to also be cloud companies. There has been a recognition that shareholders see the value in being known as a software company and migrating at least some workloads from on prem and in data centres, to the cloud.
Work is something you do, not somewhere you go. With the right technology, many people can do their job irrespective of locations.
Some have done this successfully. Others are still trying to get there and re-adjusting their strategy. But one thing that has become clear is that you cannot do this by default. Multicloud by design is the logical end point.
Public cloud has proven to be a good option based on application workload requirements, data sovereignty, latency and costs. But it is not suitable for all data. Some of it can be managed better on prem, some in the private cloud. The key to a multicloud by design strategy is the idea of aligning the right workloads with the right platforms and ensuring you can operate your assets with one consistent, flexible framework.
Multicloud by design, with true data portability from ground to cloud and cloud to ground, is the product of a decade of innovation and disruption. It means private cloud providers can now supply their software in the public cloud marketplace. In addition, solutions are all available on a similar consumption model, giving the customer choice for any workload at any location.
Hybrid working: Accessing your data
If that’s the management of your data, the practical realisation of that is hybrid working – where you access the data.
Prior to 2020, many IT decision-makers had concerns about a hybrid working model, from being able to provide end-user technology to employees remotely, to ensuring employees remained productive and felt included in the organisation.
The pandemic had a transformative effect on where and how we worked, with organisations having no choice, but to adapt and enable their users to work away from the office.
Work is something you do, not somewhere you go. With the right technology, many people can do their job irrespective of locations.
Employees, particularly of the younger generation who are digital natives, see technology as an extension of themselves. And so, the devices their companies provide them with need to provide this seamless experience that enables collaboration, even if some members of a team are at home while others are in an office, and more still are on the move.
Hybrid working is here to stay – enabled by Digital Employee Experience teams, which combine the roles and interactions of HR and IT, to ensure that all of an organisation’s people have the technology they need to work at their best, wherever they work best.
Cyber resilience: Protecting your data
But all these endpoints outside an organisation increases the number of vulnerabilities.
The UK and USA have disproportionately more victims of cyber crime per million internet users compared to other countries. According to a Detica report with the Office of Cyber Security and Information Assurance, the annual cost of cybercrime in the UK is £27 billion – with ransomware the most observed threat.
And the human risk management platform, Cybsafe has found that 90% of data breaches are a result of human error. It means that training our teams to identify possible breaches and raising awareness at speed is incredibly important. On average, advanced cyberattacks go 197 days undetected.
Dell Technologies and Microsoft have a joint zero trust approach. It is the idea that no user or device can have access until safety is verified. Organisations need to assess the risk landscape continuously, in an agile manner with end-to-end visibility across their entire enterprise estate.
But this can only go so far. Ultimately, a breach is inevitable even with the best prevention in place. The real challenge is having a plan for recovery, identifying and protecting the critical assets that are required to build a minimum viable enterprise and get back online as quickly as possible.
By providing isolation, immutability and intelligent analytics to protect critical data within a dedicated vault, cyber recovery solutions and services can significantly improve an organisation’s resilience to an attack – reducing the risk of and damage caused to critical data and the business itself.
Generative AI: Leveraging value from your data
So, you have your multicloud by design strategy to manage your data. You have a hybrid team working effectively and seamlessly across multiple locations. You have cybersecurity and recovery solutions in place to protect your data.
The next step for organisations in the data era, is getting value from that data.
Generative AI is the innovation accelerator of the decade. We are seeing organisations remove budget restraints to invest in a Gen AI strategy, because it is a trillion-dollar market opportunity.
Dell Technologies surveyed 500 IT decision makers with Gen AI implementation responsibilities across the US, UK, Germany and France. The focus of the research was to better understand organisations’ readiness to embrace Gen AI, where their organisations are on this journey and what factors are critical to realising its potential.
We found that 71% of UK IT leaders are increasing their IT budgets to pursue the opportunity. Of those who have moved beyond pilot stages, 61% expect to see value on this investment in less than one year, and 81% believe Gen AI is on track for impact in their organisations.
In fact, IDC research indicates that enterprises worldwide expect to spend more than half of their technology budgets on innovation through 2024, with a decreasing percentage spent on keeping the lights on.
We view Gen AI as a new category of computing in the technology stack. It has very distinct characteristics. It doesn’t replace anything, but it expands the use of computational machines to open up new ways of automation. The compute will be fed by massive unstructured and object storage infrastructure, driven by more and more data.
And the models created by Gen AI will need to be protected, as some of the most valuable data ever created.
Just like the PC, the internet and the smartphone before, it will transform industries and the way we live and work. If you’re curious and you like to learn, there’s never been a better time to be alive and never a better opportunity to make yourself and your organisation smarter and more productive.
If you want to find out more about Dell’s solutions for Generative AI, click here.
And if you want to hear more about these topics and Dell’s perspectives on the innovation and ideas of the future, join us at Dell Technologies Forum on 28th November, at Magazine London. You can register here.
