Faced with the uncertainty of recent months, the ability of companies to adapt, betting only on technology and digital, has become essential. Businesses feel more concerned than ever about operational agility.
Over the next few months, expect to see an acceleration of digital transformation initiatives led by IT leaders with the use of open source hybrid strategies, to address some emerging challenges, including the talent shortage.
Open source is gaining ground in business
Driving innovation in the software sector and business technology that has become essential, open source is gaining more and more followers: 90% of IT managers would already use this type of solution to make their IT infrastructure more modern, develop more applications and lead digital transformation projects.
Open source appears to be an excellent vector of performance and software durability, with secure deployment and low obsolescence, thanks to communities of developers. According to Gartner, more than three quarters of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production by 2022, up from less than 30% in 2020.
However, faced with the complexity of implementing these environments and the specificity of the knowledge required, companies absolutely need to call on either experts specializing in the integration of open source solutions, or publishers of open source solutions. business source. Companies will thus be able to better manage and automate complex environments, while relying on customizable and modular open source solutions that adapt perfectly to their needs.
Pay particular attention to safety
To be more and more efficient and cover each of their specific needs, companies end up making their systems a very (too) heterogeneous whole, leading to a situation of fragility and information insecurity.
Indeed, by multiplying the solutions, we also offer more possible entry points to hackers to be able to carry out an attack, as was the case for “log4shell” a few weeks ago. On the other hand, further integrating systems for better performance and productivity helps spread an attack faster.
Security must be a priority this year in terms of IT investment for businesses. For their security culture to be viable and sustainable, they must develop their teams by developing the awareness of each employee in terms of cybersecurity responsibility.
To do this, security resources should not be confined to the IT department alone but develop a better understanding of enterprise-wide security issues, and encourage cross-collaboration and the integration of security into processes, products and services from the outset.
Hybrid cloud remains predominant
The cloud is essential to meet the immediate needs of businesses, according to 94% of them worldwide; and 70% are already using a hybrid cloud pilot. A dynamic of modernization of on-site infrastructures will continue to take advantage of the cloud, in particular the hybrid cloud, in the coming years.
Faced with this type of challenge, companies seek to balance the speed, efficiency and scale requirements of cloud-native technologies. Hybrid cloud has the advantage of combining both public cloud and legacy infrastructure.
In this dynamic, developers prove to be real assets for companies, to create and deploy applications on a hybrid cloud and to benefit from them thanks to the tools for orchestrating workloads and automating daily operations.
Agility is a major asset for companies today, allowing them to adapt, move workloads, create new ones, integrate or leave new clouds. But to remain agile, they cannot rely solely on a public cloud and must, on the contrary, diversify their strategy.
Two strategic priorities: attracting talent and making work hybrid
The three building blocks of a digital transformation strategy—technology, process, and people—pose specific challenges for businesses that they must overcome. Currently, a number of them (26%) face a skills or talent shortage that is their biggest barrier to transformation. Talents are lacking, they are rare and expensive.
This does not prevent digital technology from continuing to grow, with new trends resulting from the consequences of the pandemic, such as the evolution of working methods in favor of teleworking. Questions that business leaders must address and ensure, to hope to attract, retain and motivate employees.
By changing growth models, processes and technologies, digital transformation now affects all sectors without distinction. This is why a good digital transformation strategy must imperatively go through efforts in terms of talents, an acceleration of the development of critical applications and the deployment of a hybrid platform. Open source, security, hybrid cloud and talent will also be top priorities for businesses this year.