The era of Business-Defined IT has arrived, and the time has come for IT to embrace the third platform that is built on mobile devices, cloud services, social networks and big data analytics, according to Hitachi Data Systems (HDS).
Adrian de Luca, CTO of HDS Asia Pacific, said the CIO must respond to these requirements and become an architect and broker of business services rather than a technology-builder focused on data centre infrastructure.
De Luca lists five key trends that, combined with the local business drivers, will shape the IT landscape in the Asia-Pacific region in 2015.
First, smart city initiatives will drive significant momentum in the development of intelligent social infrastructure solutions that combine advanced analytics, the Internet of Things and machine-to-machine interaction.
Second, big data has become a key business imperative for organisations operating in highly-competitive industries like financial services. Scale-out infrastructure with machine learning, business context software will need to be tightly integrated to enable rapid and predictable deployment and to ensure optimal operation.
Third, hybrid clouds will emerge as the preferred approach for deploying enterprise applications. Savvy CIOs have been taking the initiative to move enterprise and mission-critical applications onto private clouds and at the same time experiment with the public cloud for transient internal workloads and even customer-facing web applications. With the public cloud however, the ease with which instances can be spun up and paid for is also resulting in “cloud sprawl”.