This Wednesday, May 17, marks World Telecommunications and Information Society Day. It is celebrated every year on May 17, in reference to the signing of the first International Telegraph Convention and the creation of the International Telegraph Union on May 17, 1865.
World Telecommunication and Information Society Day aims to raise awareness of the possibilities offered by the use of the Internet and other information and communication technologies (ICT) in economic and social spheres, as well as the means of bridging the digital divide.
Over the past decade, the challenge of connectivity has become more complex and demanding. Getting everyone online is no longer sufficient. Meaningful connectivity — the ability to enjoy a safe, satisfying, enriching, productive and affordable online experience — is the new imperative.
In today's professional world, it is difficult to remain competitive in the face of constantly evolving markets. This requires flexibility, agility, scalability, and depends largely on the organization's ability to adapt and rapidly adopt new technologies. It also relies on connections — connections with clients, the market and the industry, with partners, and with IT service ecosystems.
Established businesses cannot afford to be self-sufficient. Most of them must now contend with new, more agile players taking advantage of new technologies. As a result, they must catch up and make changes to their traditional IT infrastructure in order to gain agility and improve their own performance. At the same time, businesses must also address new challenges related to security, compliance, and viability. Making changes in such an environment is far from straightforward.
The importance of implementing the right infrastructure
At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, organisations relying on agile IT infrastructure were able to quickly gain a competitive edge. Today, in the era of hybrid working and dispersed teams, an increasing number of companies are moving towards distributed infrastructures. They can thus benefit from high-speed, low-latency interconnections between the cloud, their colocation data centres and the network edge.
Their success therefore depends on the implementation of appropriate connections, in order to improve, optimise and reduce their time to market. And in the race towards tomorrow's connected world, it is best not to take the wrong path.
The benefits of digital transformations
Faced with the growing demands of their customers and subject to fierce competition, businesses must now prove themselves more profitable and efficient. Today's customers want services available on demand and expect flawless performance. At the same time, businesses today have access to more data than ever before, and this data must be converted into strategic insights in order to make better decisions more quickly.
Before the pandemic, the trend was already towards the rapid adoption of new innovative technologies. However, according to Dell's Digital Transformation Index 2020, eight out of ten organisations accelerated their digital transformation programmes in 2020. According to a survey, the COVID-19 pandemic affected the transformation efforts of 85% of organisations, particularly with regard to service connectivity, data security, and system availability. As a result, 91% of them planned to make changes to their infrastructure following the pandemic, including increasing their bandwidth, migrating more workloads to the cloud, and increasing their capacity within their data centre. Now that we are beginning to come up for air, what progress has been made?
Towards the connected world of tomorrow
While much has been said about the challenges facing IT teams and current trends, there is little concrete information showing how different sectors are managing their IT infrastructure and the adoption of key technologies such as colocation, cloud, and edge computing.
Many companies consider themselves to be at an advanced IT maturity stage, yet feel the need to gain further maturity in order to adapt to growing cybersecurity requirements, the demand for increasingly connected and personalised experiences, and the need to improve their performance.
Many also doubt their competitiveness, despite the fact that the majority of them are already implementing a strategy to support new technologies such as edge computing (a trend that remains a distant prospect). Hybrid and private cloud remain the dominant approaches, and data center colocation is essential to organisational success: nearly all of them rely on it in their operations. However, the explosion in data volumes is causing difficulties for many of them, as one third of companies consider this phenomenon a serious problem.
What does this mean for African businesses?
The ability to access connected ecosystems will be essential in helping organisations integrate heterogeneous data types and sources, extend the reach of their network, reduce latency and costs, and improve performance, as the needs of users and infrastructures continue to grow.
The success of businesses will therefore depend on their ability to rely on the right infrastructure partner — one capable of providing them with the security, resilience, and low-latency connectivity needed to reach greater maturity.
Read also: