By Geeta Gurnani
The Cloud Transformation Report for 2023, a new global survey from the IBM Institute for Business Value, revealed that several leading businesses share a common foundation for successful digital transformation — a clear hybrid cloud strategy. Looking ahead to 2024, a hybrid cloud approach for business transformation will become the go-to choice, as businesses strive to harness many benefits including faster modernisation, security, sustainability, and the ability to unlock the power of GenAI.
Over the past three years, growing global pressures compelled organisations to patch their cloud estates in a somewhat ad hoc mix of public, private and on-premises assets. They became hybrid ‘by default’. Now they are recognising that their stacks are likely siloed with a sub-optimal use of resources, leading to difficult alignment across businesses and constrained GenAI.
As organisations seek to set up GenAI at scale, they must adopt a full-stack approach for implementation. IT environments must become open, allowing for faster innovation while ensuring that business priorities are streamlined to accelerate value.
CXOs’ priorities
Re-evaluate the infrastructure strategy for AI: Evolving AI models need intensive processing of simultaneous computations, faster security threat lifecycles, and greater computational throughput. In such a scenario, IT decision-makers should ensure that they are investing in a sustainable, compute-and-data-intensive distributed infrastructure that can support their AI methods.
Enhance hybrid data access: As organisations become hybrid ‘by design’, their stacks must allow for two critical capabilities. The first is hybrid data access, namely, the ability to connect cloud and on-premises environments. The second is security. With the introduction of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, businesses must exercise caution.
Build a skilled cloud workforce: As per a Nasscom report, it is expected that the demand for skilled cloud professionals will cross 2.2 million by 2025. As organisational cloud strategies become hybrid by design and businesses ramp up the adoption of AI and machine learning technologies, they need people who possess a deep understanding of cloud architectures to achieve specific business goals.
Sustainability first approach: With GenAI adoption growing, the increase in data processing is growing too — posing new challenges for organisations that are looking to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. During the shift to hybrid by design, businesses should leverage the right cloud tools to help deploy, track, and manage sustainability goals internally and for third parties.
As organisations embark on GenAI-led digital transformation journeys, they need to take a more intentional approach to become hybrid by design. Investing in the right talent and an agile, secure infrastructure based on an open hybrid cloud approach will provide organisations with a strong foundation to compete in the future GenAI-driven landscape.
The author is IBM Technology CTO & technical sales leader, IBM India & South Asia
