A few weeks ago I returned from my annual visit to the CES exhibition in Las Vegas – the largest technology exhibition in the world. At the exhibition it was possible to see the future directions in which the world of technology and home electronics is going – autonomous, electric and digital cars that will themselves become a kind of gadget.
Robots of all shapes and sizes and endless uses; The future of the Metaverse also looks rosy when you see the multitude of AR and VR product launches by the best global electronics manufacturers.
But from my point of view – as someone who deals with the corporate technology infrastructures on a daily basis – another element stood out. It is about the huge steps the world is taking towards more digital and more connectivity. Much more than we know today, digital on steroids, or – meet the mega-digital age.
Increasing dependence on digital
It seems as if we are already at the peak of the digital revolution today. The possibilities we get today from technology give us a greater experiential richness than at any other point in the past. This is true in the organizational application aspect, and it is all the more true for consumer users.
But this is especially true when we compare ourselves to the past. To see the future of organizations, you need to go to a futuristic technology exhibition like CES, to see the possibilities that digital is going to offer us in the mega-digital era, a digital world of magnitudes that we can only imagine.
On the other hand, it also overwhelms the tremendous dependence we will have as humans, as organizations and even as countries and human society in the ability to maintain technological continuity, around the clock, everywhere. The entire rich applicative world of the present, and certainly of the future, will not work if we cannot keep the systems active in total continuity.
There is no forgiveness for mistakes
This brings us to the need for organizations to monitor, monitor and monitor again. Monitoring of what? of the IT infrastructures, of the applications, of the hardware and of the software, monitoring of the cloud and on-premise environments. Monitoring everything, all the time, everywhere. This monitoring must be done in a deep way, it must provide the CIO with the peace he needs to work.
In the mega-digital age there will be no forgiveness or forgiveness for a fall, glitch, malfunction or stumble. The expectation of the users is absolute, to have availability at all times. This will be all the more true in an era where the new users will not be human at all – but robots, bots or intelligent AI systems in the cloud.
These systems don’t receive an apology email, they don’t care what the cause of the malfunction is and how long it will take to fix it, they need a constant input of data to continue to operate the systems that depend on them to function.
Let’s take an example from the world we know. It is usually customary to monitor the degree of availability of systems such as the Internet portal and the systems that support it. These days are no longer relevant. Today it is necessary to measure the degree of availability of all systems, those that are in the interface with a client, those that are in the back office, and everything in between.
So for example – the cyber protection systems. Full monitoring of them is required to ensure they are available around the clock. If there are barriers or bottlenecks related to these systems – then this is a loophole that potential hackers can exploit. Those who do not monitor – will not be protected. If we expand the statement from a specific field of systems to the wider world – full monitoring, around the clock, of everything, simply everything, is required.
A constantly growing market
This is probably the reason that in the coming years we will also see a considerable increase in the pace of equipping organizations with IT and digital infrastructure monitoring systems. For example, the research company Global Market Insights estimates that by 2032 we will see an annual growth rate of 15% in the scope of the market for corporate network monitoring systems, and that the market will reach the end of the forecast range to the extent of 12 billion dollars per year.
If I may provide a personal forecast – the growth rate of this market will be even higher, and correspondingly, its financial scope will also be much higher and more significant.
In conclusion, organizations are required today, not in the future, to re-examine all their basic assumptions regarding the monitoring of the technology tools in their organization, to ask forward-looking questions, to break paradigms of the past, and to take the necessary actions to strengthen this very critical field today.