While the AI revolution offers organizations new ways to boost productivity and radically reinvent business processes, many are still struggling with simplifying their digital transformation programs. These programs involve managing costs, finding the skilled people needed to ramp up application and cybersecurity monitoring efforts, and contending with new, technology-specific regulations. There is an urgent requirement for organisations across industries to modernize their infrastructure to reap the real benefits of the AI revolution. McKinsey & Co. estimates 92% of companies plan to increase their investments in AI over the next three years.
Three Steps to Help Accelerate Change
In light of all these developments, three recommendations will help you increase your agility, leave you better positioned to embrace opportunities, and respond to expected and unexpected events as technological changes unfold.
1. Now is the time to Modernize and Optimize Your Infrastructure
The key to any modernization is the way you start: your foundation. Yet, one unfortunate byproduct of the intense focus on cloud computing in recent years is that many organizations neglected their own infrastructure, including data centers, storage, and networks. However, as organizations discover that migrating workloads to public cloud services is more expensive, slower, and raises more compliance challenges than they expected, they are planning to make better use of their own infrastructure, whether that’s building their own private cloud platform or investing in private tenancies within hosted facilities, such as cloud service providers.
There is a fundamental battle between two predominant approaches in Enterprise IT. One approach is to take the supposedly “best-of-breed” components and build your own platforms. This requires you to hire great talent while taking on the overhead of managing component interoperability, security, networking, automation, and integration. Often this approach leads to silos in technology, teams, and processes, all of which become deeply ingrained and hard to break.
The alternative approach is to focus on your business applications and what brings differentiation to your business. You do this by buying platforms that are well-integrated, designed and supported by the platform provider. A classic example of that is managing virtual machine workloads and container workloads.
New workloads will add to the complexity. A good example is emerging AI Workloads. Having an established platform enables your organization to meet the greater demands that could arise this year and beyond, in a cost-effective and secure way. You can read more about our thoughts on private AI architectures in this article.
2. Data Strategy: an Essential Component of Your Platform Strategy
The need for a sound data strategy across Asia Pacific and Japan is accentuated in many jurisdictions by regulatory enforcement, such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation; Singapore’s Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA); Japan’s Act on the Protection of Personal Information (APPI); Australia’s Privacy Amendment Act (2024) and Security of Critical Infrastructure Act (2018); and South Korea’s Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA). Even more regulation, the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act, recently entered into effect.
On top of the regulatory pressures on organizations' data strategies, AI will expose weaknesses in organizations’ data management and governance. To get value from AI and limit associated risks, you will need strong data management and governance strategies.
Data storage, retrieval, and processing have many elements. The ability to store and easily retrieve data at scale in a cost-effective way is the base on which processing can be built to provide the insights, the data models, the training data for AI and many other purposes. Data services as part of your platform strategy is also an essential component to provide easy manageability of the services essential to storage, retrieval and processing.
3. Invest in a Secure and Resilient Platform
Security has always been and will remain important. Security affects the availability of your IT services, and confidence in both your services and brand. Another unfortunate trend is the continued rise of state-sponsored cyber attacks, which comes at a time when bad actors are also gaining access to AI tools that are improving their ability to write malicious code and trick users with higher-quality text and fake images.
As discussed in a recent IDC Analyst Brief sponsored by VMWare, *Cornerstones to Enabling a Cyber-Resilient Private Cloud Environment, organizations must take both preventative and recovery measures to protect their private environments from ransomware attacks.
Multiple systems and workloads increase the possibility of errors, delays in securing systems, incompatibilities, additional costs of securing, and many other side effects we should avoid. Implementing tools that work across your entire environments enable well-integrated platforms with ingrained security and networking capabilities that will help expedite and simplify implementing the security posture. Discover how VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) serves as a private cloud platform that eliminates single points of failure here.
Strive for Simplicity
As we navigate the dynamic and fast-paced landscape of 2025, striving for simplicity will be crucial. It’s always attractive to consider feeds and speeds, and multiple different solutions to solve your needs. But to set the right foundations for success, organizations must embrace simpler, well-integrated and robust platform strategies for their infrastructure, data, and security. This approach keeps them agile and competitive. The right strategies will provide a sound foundation for your organization’s next innovations.
CTA: To learn about the top 5 reasons to deploy a private cloud infrastructure that will simplify your infrastructure, read the e-book here.
* Source: IDC Analyst Brief, sponsored by VMware, Cornerstones to Enabling a Cyber-Resilient Private Cloud Environment, doc #US52355324, June 2024