Tech bytes for tea?

1. Transform

This means increasing IT agility while lowering costs and this is effectively achieved through cloud computing.

Cloud Computing will continue to be a mainstay of CIOs’ agenda as customers look for ways to more effectively manage their IT systems and optimise business environments.

Cloud Computing shows enormous promise to make organisations highly agile, adaptive and opportunistic.

At Dell, we offer our clients “Open, Secure Enterprise-class Cloud” that helps optimise IT agility, reduce cost, improve speed to market and provide solutions for a mobile workforce.

2. Connect

This point focuses on increasing productivity by enabling the next generation workforce to work securely from anywhere, anytime and on any device.

A trend that is here to stay is the Consumerisation of IT.

Many organisations have been utilising non-standard devices for many years due to shrinking budgets and their willingness to support these devices in the workplace.

The Bring your own Device (BYOD) phenomenon, in particuar smartphones and tablets, is seeing a higher rate of adoption in Asia.

Virtualisation is also going to be a key trend in 2013 as organisations look to manage operations and distribute virtual workloads across the data center more efficiently.

With virtualisation, businesses can increase their ability to:

• Meet evolving business environments with effective strategies that leverage existing resources.
• Change and scale the infrastructure to support your business needs, without rip and replace.
• Provide streamlined test and development environments that are adaptable and configurable.
• Enable fast resource provisioning and workload balancing for servers and your personnel.
• Provide support for affordable business continuity strategies.

3. Inform

Customers want to gain control of their data deluge and use it to drive insights to gain a competitive advantage. This is where we will see a focus on Big Data, Storage and Analytics.

With Big Data, organisations strive to become decision-making innovators that analyse  data strategically to help predict customer behaviour and market demand.

In addition, Big Data will remain a priority as organisations look for scalable environments that can store and analyse large and ever-growing amounts of data.

Next is Storage. The nature of computing and the data center is changing – customers are faced with multiple, and often competing models of how IT needs to be delivered.

Customers increasingly tell us they want their data when they want it, where they want it and how they want it. They find that legacy storage architectures no longer meet their needs.

Ultimately, customers want to scale storage environments to any size within their organisations at a lower cost, and continuously protect and optimise their data center environment.

4. Protect

This refers to protection from organised attacks to everyday behaviours of employees that unknowingly enable cyber theft.

Data Protection means maintaining access to key data and applications as this becomes increasingly critical to assuring business continuity for customers of all sizes.

However, variations in individual data protection requirements – from recovery point and recovery time objectives to operating environments to virtualisation strategies and cost constraints – mean that one solution will not fit all customer needs.

Managed Security Services (MSS) has a strong and growing client base in Asia-Pacific region, and the outlook for vendor growth and improved services for clients remains excellent.

Gartner anticipates that the Asia/Pacific market for MSS will continue to grow from 28% to 33% annually through 2015.

Domestic markets in India, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia will continue to expand, and emerging markets in the People’s Republic of China, Korea and Taiwan will attract greater participation by foreign and new domestic MSSPs.