2015 saw exciting conversations revolving around the Internet of Things, cyber security and Big Data analytics. As the amount and complexity of data that is available at our fingertips grows, it becomes important to find a better way to store, manage and retrieve data

The IT industry is undergoing a significant shift towards digital transformation. Businesses are evolving their IT strategies to take advantage of cloud and data mobility. There have also been exciting conversations revolving around how the Internet of Things, cyber security and Big Data analytics are setting the agenda for the digital transformation of businesses and cities.  

There is no doubt that the hybrid cloud is taking off. Therefore, IT organisations must learn to support a modern constituency of end users who are eager to create new, flexible, and responsive IT environments and see the public cloud as a solution.

At the same time, they are scrutinising the return value from past IT investments, reducing budgets and rethinking how they consume and use data. This evaluation is creating caution around transactional spending for traditional storage systems, and is diverting their budget towards transformational projects and modern architectures like scale-out, software-defined, flash, converged and hybrid cloud.

The role of storage administrators will continue to evolve in response to the transforming IT landscape; they will shift from being builders and operators of their own data centers to being brokers of services that span both private and public cloud resources.

On a different note, we are now entering the Age of the Digital Consumer with the rise of the third platform era, the Internet of Things. We are seeing a significant increase in the adoption of connected personal devices such as smartphones and ‘wearables’, with fitness monitoring,  automotive safety, holiday planning and even lower insurance rates being some of the convenient features that people are already anticipating from IoT.

In turn, businesses are using these new technologies to deliver new experiences and value-add offers to customers, improve the efficiency of their businesses, and build global business systems.

As the amount and complexity of data that is available at our fingertips grows through mobile devices, social platforms and IoT implementations, it becomes important to find a better way to store, manage and retrieve data.

Game-changing innovations are cropping up in every industry from manufacturing to healthcare to transportation, primarily due to the rapidly decreasing cost of implementing IoT technologies.

For instance, auto-companies are taking the opportunity to create more value for drivers from information that is available in the new generation of connected cars. Insights from real-time monitoring of a driver’s vital signs can help determine the likelihood of a driver falling asleep at the wheel and thus create an early-warning system.

It is exciting innovations like this that we think will be game changers in 2016 and so we constantly urge our customers to remain competitive by thinking outside the box. Ultimately, the question companies should be asking themselves is, “How can we make life easier with what we’re designing, manufacturing or providing?”

Additionally, as the Big Data market continues to mature, Artificial Intelligence and its relevance to the Smart Cities conversation becomes clearer. It is predicted that by 2018, at least 20% of all workers globally will use automated assistance technologies to make decisions and get work done. This digital transformation of how we do things will pave the way for companies to redefine their customers’ experience and achieve greater levels of productivity.

As such, for the IT industry, new tools and products that simplify the movement of data will make this transformation possible. Seamless data management and secure data control across cloud resources are critical. It will enable IT organisations to complement a private cloud with a public cloud strategy that doesn’t introduce new risks, complicate policies, or result in the loss of control of valuable business information.