5 Key Developments that will shape Information Infrastructure Landscape in Asia

It is crucial for organizations to implement the right technology and infrastructure solution now in order to succeed in an increasingly data-driven economy. And wide technology trends will combine with business drivers in Asia Pacific to shape the IT landscape in this region over the coming year.

Big data analytics will go beyond proof of concept phase and into production in established markets.

The adoption of big data analytics will continue to grow at an unprecedented pace in 2014, especially in industries like banking and finance, telecommunications and retail. For example,through the effective use of big data banks can achieve business transformation by creating a customer- focused interaction, optimizing enterprise risks and increasing flexibility. And in telecommunication services, big data can deliver deeper insights into their operations and build smarter networks. In retail big data can help generate valuable insights for personalization and improving the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

So the enterprises will have to find ways to uncover value in their excising data stores and deploy scalable infrastructures to extract meaningful outcomes from big data projects.

Object stores will play an important role, the prediction is objects stores which contain metadata that describe an organization’s data and the policies to govern it, will enable organizations to extract greater insights from the data they already have. Also multi-petabyte file capabilities, coupled with compute capabili- ties, will become the new norm for dealing with the big data explosion.

The cloud broker model will enable organizations to transform their IT departments from technology implementers to business innovators

Global system integrators and traditional IT infrastructure resellers will increasingly shift their value proposition to infrastructure transformation and business services, freeing organization to innovate more. According to Gartner, enterprises with high demand IT infrastructure and application services will start exploring the cloud broker model, preferring to work with providers who act as vendor-neutral third party cloud services brokerages. And the role of cloud broker can be played not only by telcos, but also by global system integrators, local resellers, government agencies and by some large enterprise IT organizations. So the prediction is that the technology refresh will focus on applications and business outcomes rather than infrastructure. And Virtualization and automation will rede- fine the role of IT administrator within the organization.

Concerns over data security will reach a tipping point, not only for mobile data, but also data in content repositories

As the enterprise mobility and BYOD grow, organizations will re- examine their privacy and security policies and look to solutions to address them, such as enterprise file sync and share data encryption. IDC predicts that by 2015 , the global cloud and mobile security market will grow to US$6 billion. Mobile security will grow to make up a third of this market as enterprises seek to protect their systems from malware that not only compromises mobile devices but can also use them as a stream into the enterprise network. Prediction is organizations will adopt enterprise sync and share solutions for shadow IT.

The Asia Pacific region will witness an explosion of unstructured data from mobile communications

Asia Pacific will experience rapid development of high-speed mobile network infrastructures that will continue to drive the rapid adoption of smartphones. And with 4G LTE services the uploading limit will also increase which will have tremendous implications for the mobile data in the region. And to mange the growing volume of digital content, telcos will need to develop a scalable, high performance and reliable IT infrastructure architecture for that. So there will be an exponential increase in enterprise Flash adoption across the telco value chain. With enterprise-grade Flash delivering a quantum improvement in performance compared with traditional storage options and greater longevity over commodity, SSD technology will provide a boost for delivery of content over mobile networks. For example, only 8 Hitachi Accelerated Flash modules are required to achieve 5000,000 IOPS, whereas 80SSDs will be required to achieve the same level of performance, and HDD will not be able to do that.

Competition between countries and region to become the digital hub of Asia will enter a critical stage in 2014

Service providers will invest in state of the art facilities and advanced infrastructures to differentiate their services, and end user organizations will invest in transforming their business systems. And the data center industry in the region will continue to grow as countries and regions compete to become the digital hub of Asia. Many organizations will use this as an opportunity to transform their legacy IT to new consumption- based IT models. As a first step, many will start with the deployment of on-premise private clouds to host traditional enterprise workload, such as email, database, file services and backup and recovery. So in coming time we will see technology refresh will focus on applications and business outcomes rather than the infrastructure. And more organizations will adopt the private cloud for provisioning and self- service in a secure cloud environment.