IDC Future of Digital Infrastructure Predictions

To successfully navigate the Future of Digital Infrastructure, organizations must invest in and foster a digital-first culture, that leverages trusted industry ecosystems, generates profitable revenue growth, provides empathetic customer experiences, and demonstrates an ability to adapt operating models to complex customer requirements.

The supporting digital infrastructure will encompass dedicated on-premises and edge systems as well as shared public cloud solutions. It will span compute, storage, network, and infrastructure software (including virtualization and containers), as well as the automation, AI/ML analytics and security software and cloud services needed to maintain and optimize legacy and modern applications and data.

In the coming years, organizations will deploy, operate, and scale digital infrastructure to ensure consistent security, performance, and compliance across all resources, regardless of where and how they are deployed. These organizations will invest in more intelligent, autonomous operations and take advantage of flex consumption and strategic vendor partnerships, to promote agility and ensure that the business, and its digital infrastructure, can continue to perform in the face of a wide range of unexpected scenarios – social, geopolitical, economic, climate or business related.

Top 10 Future of Digital Infrastructure Predictions

IDC’s worldwide Future of Digital Infrastructure top 10 predictions, point to a Future Enterprise digital infrastructure strategy that must address digital infrastructure resiliency and trust; data-driven operational complexity; and business outcomes-driven sourcing and autonomous operations.

Prediction 1: By 2023, G2000 leaders prioritize business objectives over infrastructure choice, deploying 50% of new strategic workloads using vendor-specific APIs that add value but reduce workload portability.

Prediction 2: In 2023, over 80% of G2000 will cite business resiliency to drive verifiable infrastructure supply chain integrity as a mandatory and non-negotiable vendor evaluation criterion.
Prediction 3: By 2023, most C-Suite leaders implement business critical KPIs tied to data availability, recovery and stewardship, as rising levels of cyber-attacks expose the scale of data at risk.
Prediction 4: By 2024, 75% of G2000 digital infrastructure RFPs require vendors to prove progress on ESG/Sustainability initiatives with data, as CIOs rely on infrastructure vendors to help meet ESG goals.
Prediction 5: By 2024, due to an explosion of edge data, 65% of G2000 will embed edge-first data stewardship, security and network practices into data protection plans to integrate edge data into relevant processes.
Prediction 6: By 2025, a 6X explosion in high dependency workloads leads to 65% of G2000 firms using consistent architectural governance frameworks, to ensure compliance reporting and audit of their infrastructure.
Prediction 7: By 2025, 60% of enterprises will fund LOB and IT projects through OPEX budgets, matching how vendors provide their services with a focus on outcomes that are determined by SLA’s and KPIs.
Prediction 8: By 2025, 70% of companies will invest in alternative computing technologies to drive business differentiation by compressing time to value of insights, from complex data sets.
Prediction 9: By 2026, 90% of Global 2000 CIOs will use AIOps solutions to drive automated remediation and workload placement decisions that include cost and performance metrics, improving resiliency and agility.
Prediction 10: By 2026, mid-market companies will shift 65% of infrastructure spending from traditional channels towards more app-centric trusted advisors.