IDC refers to businesses that have a vision and strategy for digital transformation and are farther along in implementing this transformation as “digitally determined” businesses. For such businesses, key decisions are made entirely on insights gained from timely analysis of diverse data sets, stitched together by various artificial intelligence as well as machine learning and analytics technologies. Considered a necessary element for business success, data is often referred to as “the new oil.” Like oil, data needs to be refined in order to be transformed into a usable state or product. For example, data collected at various edge locations often needs to be refined, processed, and analyzed so it can be used to develop new insights for the business.
To protect the digital asset value, data and infrastructure security is the top IT infrastructure-related investment that organizations make, followed by datacenter IT compute and storage infrastructure (illustrated in Figure 1, next page). Other key IT infrastructure-related investments include mobility, applications, organizational skills, cloud, and data analytics. IDC confirms these findings to be consistent year over year, emphasizing the importance of IT infrastructure to digital transformation. It is no longer an afterthought but rather a strategic investment area.
