With two years of the pandemic behind them, many businesses that open offices, factories, and other locations this year will be at varying stages of their digital transformation journeys by the time they do.
In the new hybrid working arrangement, some factories would have worked with safe distance standards by having smart gadgets and controls connect to personnel stationed remotely.
During the epidemic, however, office building owners could have leveraged the interruption to install smart features such as connected gantries and lifts that allow tenants and visitors to safely and easily register and get admission.
As users adjust to the so-called new normal, many of these changes will be permanent. The digital settings’ experience and quality, on the other hand, will vary.
In the real world, businesses will discover the reliability of their Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, and they will discover that a low-latency network link is critical to many digitalization efforts’ success.
During the new year, there are four key themes that will continue to boost businesses’ digital activities, enhancing their operational and strategic capacities.
1. A move towards simplicity
Because legacy systems are still in place in many other conventional businesses, not just highly regulated sectors like finance, transportation, and energy, today’s IT architecture can be extraordinarily complicated.
Despite digitalization, these monolithic systems may still be the source of much of the data utilized in digital apps, and corporations often have a large number of such disconnected systems.
Expect this to alter in the future, as many businesses have been shifting to a more unified long-term foundation, typically with a mix of public clouds and on-premises configurations. In order to achieve such a unified information system, IT infrastructure and operational systems will need to be combined and integrated into a single data fabric.
In 2022, many people will want to make their infocomm systems more efficient. This would not only make it easier for management to create efficiencies and break down data silos, but it would also improve overall cybersecurity. After all, a basic system is more cost-effective to maintain than a more complex one that lacks visibility and necessitates frequent maintenance.
2. When IT meets OT robustness
In recent years, the intersection of information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) has been a fascinating one. The two are increasingly merging, with IT providing a lot more of OT’s robustness and availability, while OT adopting IT’s flexibility and programmability.
A factory floor, office, or retail outlet in a smart organization will have IT and OT operating together in a coordinated manner, ensuring that data collected on the ground is rapidly and reliably captured, analyzed, and transferred to users. The ability of IT to work beyond the data center and closer to the edge, where the majority of the data is generated, is improving. IT equipment will need to be strong enough to survive at the edge, where routine restarting is no longer acceptable.
These characteristics will become more common in businesses. After all, a gadget can only be smart if it is turned on and working in the environment it has to work in, whether it’s in the basement of a building all day monitoring the performance of elevators and air-conditioning systems, or in a remote oil field ensuring that a pipeline is working properly.
3. Building up the edge
The edge is one of the infrastructure components that will undoubtedly see a lot of activity in the coming year.
Many businesses have already learned the value of low-latency connectivity and quick response times through the usage of IoT devices and sensors, which needs data crunching to be closer to the action rather than being transmitted to a remote data center.
With 5G and Wi-Fi 6 delivering high-speed connectivity, more compute and storage tasks will be carried out at the edge in a more distributed environment.
A factory, for example, will be able to immediately evaluate photographs of its goods in order to identify any flaws and swiftly calibrate production to increase both yield and quality. A unified IT and OT system will be required to enable this type of continuous and recursive quality assurance.
The new year will assist many more businesses in focusing their needs for not only fast and powerful devices, but also more sturdy gadgets that will reside at the edge of their infrastructure.
They would collaborate with cloud data centers, which would continue to perform vital functions as heavy-lifting compute and backup, for example. In the day-to-day operation, the devices and compute modules at the edge will handle real-time analysis and parameter optimization.
4. Having intrinsic cybersecurity
After another year of increased cyber threats, it should come as no surprise that many businesses are beefing up their security architecture, not only by hardening their devices, but also by monitoring for possible data breaches.
As previously said, a more uniform, less complicated setup that allows users to view, automate, and orchestrate simple processes such as updating devices or reconfiguring them for new roles is a part of the solution.
This could entail removing obsolete, non-supportable hardware that would be considered a security risk if it were to be replaced.
It is tough to stamp out the most aggressive attacks, as high-profile supply-chain attacks in 2021 demonstrated. As a result of the increasing dangers, businesses will have to choose suppliers that are committed to delivering a well-tested product with security built-in.
Hardened versions of servers and smart devices designed for the commercial and industrial environments in which they will be used are to be expected. In the next years, they will assist both IT and OT systems in countering the more sophisticated cyber threats that are expected.
The digital voyage is deciphered
These aren’t the only ones that will have an impact on businesses. The key for them to progress on their digital journey will be to deconstruct many of the problems that come with it. The conversation between the IT and OT teams will progress to the point where they will be able to find more common ground and fewer perceived obstacles.
From strong servers and IoT devices at the edge to data analytics capabilities, the good news is that purpose-built solutions are more readily available for deployment. The days of sluggish deployments and long customization efforts are over.
Many of these rollouts will rely heavily on systems integrators. They can help produce the measurable results that organizations desire to continue to advance in the post-pandemic recovery and to move forward in the IT & OT convergence with their intimate knowledge of the sector and comprehension of customer needs.
