Charbel Zreiby is a renowned industry & channel executive leader in the Information Technology sector. His passion for technology has fuelled his journey of 22 years working closely with customers & partners and during which he’s managed to build a successful track record and win multiple industry awards. Charbel has been working with the channel ecosystem for the better part of his career in different leadership roles and with different Global IT vendors covering the Middle East Turkey & Africa region. Charbel is a regular speaker at multiple regional events and in addition to holding a master’s degree in computer engineering, he is also certified in the fields of executive leadership coaching, emotional intelligence & others.
In today’s world, especially after lessons learned during and post-pandemic, business owners understand the importance of preparing for any form of disruptions that may arise. To do that, businesses are counting on their technology leaders to setup the right strategy that will properly gear them up to seize the opportunity as it presents itself and be ready for any change that may be imposed by external factors. Yet understanding the different technologies and the complexities some would bring into the IT environment makes the task daunting. For that I have compiled & summarized the six technology shifts that we believe, at Dell Technologies, will enable businesses in almost every industry in the coming years.
- Multicloud
While network-based computing existed since the 1960s, it is believed that the first time the term “Cloud-Computing” has been used in one of the IT conferences in 2006 and the cloud model started gaining more popularity in 2010 and mostly what we know today as public cloud. Since then, the cloud model has been evolving and we moved from the cloud first mentality (i.e. public cloud being the answer to mostly everything) to a data first mentality (i.e. where does my workload need to be in order to get the best performance, flexibility & security) and workloads started moving back to being either on private clouds or on public clouds, at times on both (i.e. hybrid clouds) or even on multiple clouds and this is where we are today: in a multi-cloud world.
The cloud idea will continue to exist in the coming years. We believe we will see a lot of new development to the cloud models we know today, and it will remain a critical operating model for the businesses to strive.
- Edge
First let’s define the edge in a simple way and that’s how we word it at Dell Technologies: “Every location where data is acted on near its point of creation to generate immediate & essential value to the business”. Today, the Edge is thought to be leading us into the 4th industrial revolution or commonly referred to as “Industry 4.0” (it’s always good to look back in history and remember how the 1st, 2nd & 3rd industrial revolutions, being Water & Steam, Electricity, Digital Technology respectively and how these affected societies).
A recent study from IDC (during 2021) predicted that “The number of new operational processes deployed on edge infrastructure will grow from less than 20% to over 90% in 2024” – this means that the expectation is to see more distributed architectures that will put technology much closer to users than ever before.
Today Edge solutions exist in & for every industry (Manufacturing, Healthcare, Retail, Digital Cities, Transportation & others…) and with the tech advancement we are seeing, many use cases which we thought wouldn’t be possible to achieve few years ago can actually be implemented today and in the future.
- 5G
Most think it’s just another generation or evolution of the 4G mobile network like 4G was to 3G yet 5G is a total new kind of network that comes with promises (that it actually fulfils) of high data speeds, super low latency (some would even say virtually it’s 0), better availability & reliability that its predecessors and that makes it a strong connectivity fabric for the distributed multi-cloud world from edge to core to public clouds.
The power of 5G also sits in its ability to help make things possible in many industries such as Telemedicine in healthcare and the ability to even perform remote surgeries using robotics in real time. 5G also enables different industries like better collaboration in a hybrid workplace, self-driving vehicles in transportation, smart factories in manufacturing, etc…
This makes 5G, most definitely, as one of the essential technology shifts that everyone should consider when planning for the near future.
- AI/ML
We started witnessing AI (Artificial Intelligence) not so long ago in many forms (Bots such as chat bots, websites equipped with AI that can write blogs for you, create Art for you, manage time on your behalf, etc…) and some of which are so advanced that one would believe that machines are becoming intellectually equal to humans, at times even superior. Some people predict that AI automation could be the reason why some jobs will stop existing…
To date, we’ve been using AI to complete specific tasks whether digital or mechanical and we have kept the decision making in the hand of humans yet as technology advances we will gradually see the decision making going into the AI and we believe that in the next three to five years AI and ML (Machine Learning, a form of AI) will be responsible of most of the infrastructure and this is what makes it an important technology to consider when planning your future strategy.
- Data Management
Managing data when it’s at rest is something the IT world has been good at and at Dell Technologies, we’ve been providing solutions to store, manage, protect & secure our customers data since decades. Today and in the coming future, data is generated everywhere in a distributed environment, it’s generated by multiple devices & sensors, it’s flowing across a multi-cloud world and it needs to be dealt with and acted upon to take decision within milliseconds: this creates a new challenge which is managing “Data in motion” and this is where we’ve been focusing a lot and what each organization needs to anticipate in their future IT strategy. To give the idea some context here’s a small example: A sensor in a manufacturing plant generates data that flows into an edge gateway then all the way into a cloud to get processed by an AI then a decision is sent back all the way to that sensor – now imagine that plant with thousands of sensors and then you’d have an idea of how many data pipelines are being created and are in motion at the same time.
- Security
The biggest topic to ever discuss and the most important in every strategy you build for your IT especially with the threats landscape evolving as technology evolves. Today, threats are more sophisticated and targeted, at times they live in your infrastructure that you believe is secure, yet you don’t know they exist nor react in time, they stay dormant for long period of times, they hold your business and data at ransom and so on… Today we need to start looking at security differently than what it is today which is fragmented and find ways on how we can make it more integrated and intrinsic by making sure it follows a standard framework and being built in every dimension of the business and the infrastructure.
The essence of any strategy is being ready for what comes next and for that every element you integrate in your future planning should give you the agility, adaptivity & flexibility to drive your business in the right direction. At Dell Technologies we work closely with our customers to help them take those decisions and build the right modern infrastructure that will serve them today and that’s ready for the future.