Priorities shift: IT strategies re-evaluated
As you may already know, the cloud is becoming increasingly popular. However, based on the current crisis, thousands of corporate companies, large and small, across the world, are staring into a business void with around 20 per cent revenue shortfalls. It is becoming the intention of more and more companies to completely change their business models and the technology to ensure the same situation does not happen again.
Telstra has recently published a new white paper which identifies the industry after COVID-19. The plan is to scope out the problem and then provide insights on how to recalibrate IT and business strategies.
The main insight from the survey is that the pandemic has accelerated digital transformation and redefined its meaning from a pre-COVID-19 situation. It demonstrates that networks underpin technology to support the distributed and nomadic workforce.
As a result, 93% of businesses included in the report, state they have changed their IT priorities either incrementally, significantly, or dramatically. Businesses are updating their overall IT strategy, with the top priority for respondents across all regions to set up policies for their remote workforce. This includes areas such as ensuring employees can connect securely and access their applications and data.
Dustin Kehoe, Services Director from GlobalData who produced the report, said, “It was interesting to see the overwhelmingly positive response for video conferencing. While the technology has always been available, we are seeing a generational shift in perception from pre-and post-COVID-19 eras.”
Given all this, it’s clear that the broad IT industry should be willing and able to get their customers cloudified.
According to analyst Caroline Chappel, Research Director for the Digital Infrastructure Strategies programme at Analysys Mason, what is emerging is a value chain with its important power positions now in the process of being properly defined.
“The colonisation of the cloudstack piece which a year ago we thought was going to go to some startups plus VMware and Red Hat, has very quickly transformed because of the need to get to market fast. As a result, it is being colonised by the public cloud providers, as the announcements of the last couple of weeks have shown. They already have their cloud stacks and each has its own following of cloud developers (possibly the most important factor),” she says.
Reaching thousands of edges
Operators can easily build their optical networks out between data centres to support cloud network growth. But the more interesting story happens at a higher level. Enterprises will need to deploy applications at many thousands of edges around the world, so if operators want to stay in the game, they need to service enterprises at scale. The problem is, not even a huge company will be prepared to go and stitch together deals with dozens of operators around the world, so the logic is that optical connect becomes a wholesale play for operators and the connections are put in place at scale by the big cloud provider partners.
Many of the operators are multi-sourcing their cloud providers. The more cloud providers gathered together on a telco’s footprint, the better the opportunity for telcos to get involved in the chain.
The multi-sourcing approach is always a good de-risking strategy and it has the added advantage of avoiding any one company or technology becoming over-dominant.