In one sense, our cloud journey has reached its destination. There’s little doubt that cloud is now mainstream technology and has been for some time, especially when you consider it’s over 10 years since the NIST Cloud Computing Reference Architecture was published – and cloud had already been around for a while even then.

Back in November 2020 I wrote an article about the rise of ‘Good Enough IT’ (The Rise of ‘Good Enough’ IT) which looked at the effects the pandemic had taken on spending and planned architecture refreshes and the risks associated with doing nothing. 12 months on and what a year we have had! We all know about the pandemic, so I will just leave that there (but if anyone has a crystal ball to predict the future, please let me know!).

The first report from Logicalis’ 2021 Global CIO Survey, The Changing Role of the CIO: Agents of Change, revealed there has been a notable shift in the role of the CIO, as respondents highlighted customer experience, innovation and operational efficiency as their top priorities. To improve these areas, CIOs increasingly rely on data to understand changing behaviours and adjust their strategy accordingly.

As we emerge from a period of global socioeconomic volatility, we have an opportunity to capitalise on the ‘forced experiments’ of the last year and consider their learnings from such a challenging period.

While 78% of businesses realise the value of digital transformation, only a quarter are using data to drive business strategy

Work used to be a fixed place you go to, but it has evolved into something you do. Top and emerging talent is conscious of this transition and expects more flexibility from employers when it comes to the workplace. Research suggests 77% of Gen X employees would prefer to work for a company that gives them the flexibility to work from anywhere rather than at an expensive office.

This week I read a great article from Jenna Sargent (here) on how low-code tools can be used to eliminate Shadow IT. The point was simple, if the IT department doesn’t provide individuals with the right tools they need, then traditionally we would have seen users searching for the right tool for themselves and using unsanctioned apps. This situation can lead to security, data leak, etc risks. The new model emerging is to facilitate users with low-code tools and say that if the current set of apps doesn’t give you the workflow that best fits your role, create your own.

So congratulations, you’ve migrated what workloads you can to a secure production-ready cloud and have built a hybrid cloud architecture between that and your non-cloud apps and data. You’ve just got on the cloud bus, next stop optimisation.

These days you can stick a CPU on just about anything to make it ‘smart’. You’ve probably heard about Smart NICs, Infrastructure Processing Units (IPUs) or Computational Storage as concepts, but these technologies are being rapidly developed and will be let loose on the mainstream market soon. So, what’s it all about?