As traditional businesses gradually mold themselves according to the realities of the new machine age, the implications of IT are boundless. The primary differentiator for a successful business today is dependent on the readiness of its IT infrastructure. An unadaptable, slow, expensive infrastructure is a bigger competitive threat than any ingenious start-up or disruptive market force.
Companies with legacy technology architectures, therefore, face a dilemma: how to strike a perfect balance between the present and future state of IT infrastructure.
By 2020 the major areas of focus and changes will be:
(a)The relevance of cyber-security for building a brand.
(b)The growing supremacy of all sorts of customer-facing technology
(c)The shift the mindset with innovation becoming a necessity rather than an option
(d)The focus would shift from cost-cutting to investment in technology
To materialize these business priorities, the IT mandate will grow beyond the usual sphere of satisfying customers and employees, tying up with the business and shaving costs, to forming a customer relationship, uncovering new business value and working towards business agility and innovation while also upgrading security.
As information technology continues to gain more prominence, new business processes and models are being developed to suit the new, emerging technologies. The fast-changing environment opens up a vast variety of opportunities for new and upcoming businesses. In order to make full use of such vast potential, organizations need to be on top of the fact that their IT infrastructure is well-equipped to identify and work upon the challenges that lay before them in the fast-changing environment.
With new emerging challenges, a new level of expertise is mandatory in both software and hardware. The upcoming generation of professionals with adequate expertise and training would find a very rich job potential to tap within this domain. Opportunities and challenges run simultaneously with each other and if someone expects to explore new opportunities, they should be well-equipped to deal with the unexpected nature of challenges that they may have to face.