The COVID-19 pandemic forced organisations to execute mass work-from-home initiatives. This raised the importance of connectivity with a distributed workforce becoming the new normal.
IDC expects the remote work to continue beyond 2021 resulting in an increased reliance on cloud platforms, and video collaboration tools turned into mission-critical applications.
“To harness the power of connectivity, organisations will need to overcome the complexity of managing connectedness at the scale – with the security that modern digital businesses require. This will spur investments in new infrastructure and architectures by enterprises and service providers around the region,” says Hugh Ujhazy, vice president for telecom & IoT research at IDC Asia/Pacific.
Future of Connectedness predictions:
Prediction 1: Through 2022, 40% of enhanced digital customer experiences will continue to fail because of underinvestment in intelligent, dynamic network architectures and technologies required for modern applications.
Prediction 2: By 2022, 60% of all network resources will be deployed at remote edge or service provider locations, allowing business leaders to leverage the agility of their network resources, up from 20% in 2020.
Prediction 3: By 2022, 90% of G2000 will revisit their commercial real estate footprint post-COVID-19, as many plan augmented workspaces yet do not address the connectivity needs to support a hybrid work model.
Prediction 4: By 2022, 90% of enterprises will still be struggling to find the “killer” 5G application and meaningful ROI on the up-front investment because of continued limited integration with tangential technologies.
Prediction 5: By 2023, operational complexities due to enabling robust employee connectivity will shift 25% of connectivity budgets to CaaS solutions to bundle bandwidth, security, collaboration, and mobile services.
Prediction 6: By 2023, enterprises will get a 30% boost in productivity by re-architecting networks to include a “branch of one” operating model, enabling the same secure application experience as they get on premises.
Prediction 7: By 2023, 60% of enterprises will deploy AI-enabled tools and functions to manage network performance issues proactively to deliver improved performance of applications by as much as 35%.
Prediction 8: By 2025, 75% of enterprises in industrial verticals like manufacturing, logistics, and mining will adopt private 5G networks to achieve network reliability/coverage and maintain data control and security.
Prediction 9: In 2024, 85% of G2000 will see the network admin as strategic since it involves working with app developers, the CISO office, and line of business to ensure business continuity, compliance, and resiliency.
Prediction 10: By 2024, 45% of large venues such as stadiums, airports, and campuses will adopt elastic, scalable on-demand networks to consolidate access technologies to seamlessly blend traffic between things and people.
Enterprise connectivity is already starting to define the future resiliency of an organisation. Organisations that can harness the power of intelligence and accelerated disruption through strategic innovation, and digital platforms for superior customer engagement, are showing greater resiliency in today's pandemic-affected world and are also better positioned for the eventual recovery.
IDC believes that the Future of Connectedness will become a bedrock of every organisation's digital resiliency agenda moving forward, as organisations look not only for real-time insights but also digital experiences which are scalable, secure, reliable, and fine-tuned to dynamic use cases.
