The Viewfinder

Mirroring Success: Making Your IT Architecture Digital Ready

According to IDC, “60%+ of global GDP will be digitized by 2022, with growth in every industry driven by digitally enhanced offerings, operations, and relationships and almost $7 trillion in IT-related spending in 2019–2022.”

When you contemplate the enormity of these statistics, it is easy to get lost in, and perhaps even a bit overwhelmed with, the numbers which can make it difficult to ascertain what it means for you and your organization. It also probably doesn’t help when you hear industry experts stress the silver or lead mantra that either you are going to transform or be transformed by the digital revolution.

Reading the IDC FutureScape document regarding the expansiveness of digital’s impact on the enterprise and beyond, where do you even begin? If you are asking yourself this question, you are not alone. A McKinsey survey of 1,600 incumbent companies around the globe reported that while there is universal acceptance that digital is the future, just 23 percent of those executives surveyed indicated that they have a digital reinvention strategy. In short, more than three-quarters of the executives surveyed are in a digital holding pattern despite the IDC $7 trillion IT-related spend forecast.

This “disconnect” or barrier between thought and action takes on more significant meaning when you consider IDC’s prediction that “by 2023, 75% of All IT Spending Will Be on 3rd Platform Technologies, as Over 90% of All Enterprises Build ‘Digital Native’ IT Environments to Thrive in the Digital Economy.”

Seeing The “Real” Bigger Picture

One of the things that stood out to me regarding the IDC prediction, okay two things, although they are related, was the report’s comments regarding the digital impact on business and IT. Specifically:

•          “Digital thinking” must be an integral part of every business leader’s skill set — not delegated to the organization’s IT leadership.

•          Digitization is not “confined” to just one part of the enterprise (like customer-facing functions, or online commerce organizations); it is transforming major aspects of enterprises’ offerings, operations, and relationships. With such a pervasive business impact, isolated oversight by a single executive (e.g., a chief digital officer) is unsustainable.

Gartner report indicating that CMOs spending more money than CIOs on technology is a “premise that is set to come true,” is noteworthy within the context of the above IDC statements. The reason; it confirms the breadth of digital’s impact on an organization internally as well as externally.

In the context of the above, and in his November blog post, Digital Transformation is Changing Everything. Are You Changing with It? Equinix’s Senior Director of Global Solution Marketing Steve Madden asks the following question: is an inability to effectively interconnect and interact with partners and customers hurting your ability to “collaborate in real-time and gain access to the people, data, and services you require to succeed as a digital business?”

He also goes on to ask: “is your company’s IT infrastructure evolving in ways that enable you to realize the greatest value from these vibrant ecosystems?” Specifically the emergence of blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT), transportation, and cybersecurity as part of the established industry ecosystems that include the internet, web, electronic trading, and content and digital media (CDM).

Mirroring Your Journey And Success

As you reflect on the collaborative aspects of Steve’s first question, and in response to his second question, I want to briefly talk about how by mirroring your journey, starting with understanding the unique infrastructure requirements of your business, Equinix and our partners can help your organization plan its IT infrastructure’s digital transformation by providing a map and maturity model based on our “four use cases”:

•          Network Optimization to shorten the distance between users and services applications;

•          Hybrid Multicloud to connect and segment traffic between multiple clouds and private infrastructure;

•          Distributed Security to deploy and interconnect security controls at points of digital engagement, either inside or outside your on-premises perimeter, and

•          Distributed Data to deploy and interconnect data analytics in proximity to users.

Equinix will be at Activate Digital 2019, and I would like to invite you to meet with our team to talk about how through providing a mirror for your unique journey we can help you not only transform your IT infrastructure but with it your business.

Use the following link to reserve your space today!

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