As demand for personalised and seamless interactions across all user touchpoints, devices, and channels grows unabated, businesses know they cannot afford to lag behind in processing and performing requests. Striving to keep pace, enterprises in Asia-Pacific are on a mission to digitise operations rapidly, leveraging edge computing and the multi-cloud to make services faster and more accessible to end users.
However, sustaining transformation efforts requires being nimble and responsive to the needs of end users. Currently, significant deficiencies from outdated data infrastructure stand in the way of delivering convenient, user-friendly applications, and impede enterprises from accelerating routes to market for their digital products.
Enterprises across the region are also grappling with siloed workflows and teams due to legacy systems, while a shortage of digital skills within organisations is hampering efforts to transform businesses and meet the demands of customers.
These issues highlight the fact that businesses need solutions that help them make the most of their data. Reliance on relational databases is one reason behind this, as they were not designed with today’s business needs in mind. Businesses are unable to efficiently transact the growing volume of data, and larger datasets are also fuelling demand for more computational capacity, which is driving up the costs it takes to run legacy systems.
Moreover, with rapid digitisation driving demand for rich and immersive applications, legacy data infrastructure is prone to bottlenecks when data is transferred between nodes in the cluster. Piecemeal solutions such as adding an in-memory caching tool in front of relational databases can increase responsiveness to customer expectations, but it comes with the burden of adding to operational and management complexity. Worse still, it does nothing in terms of cost-efficiency — and in fact only serves to raise the costs businesses have to shoulder.
Successful digitisation hinges on agile workflows
To thrive in the face of these challenges, organisations need the ability to collect growing volumes of data, engage with clients, and crucially, transact that data instantaneously in a cost-effective manner.
Achieving that, however, requires a data infrastructure that is scalable and agile. For businesses in Asia to scale, they need a deeper and consistent understanding of their data. In addition, data replication and synchronisation, whether in the cloud, in an edge data centre, or on a device is critical to their missions.
This requires tapping into a software-defined model, which harnesses composability to enable organisations to tailor their data architecture based on organisational needs. It enables independent configuration of data management, processing requirements and application workloads without increasing demands on end users to have complex technical skills.
For example, utilising software-defined components frees up the business from the responsibility of reconfiguring physical assets like servers as workload characteristics evolve, therefore, eliminating the need to manage the underlying infrastructure. As a result, the burden on developers to capture and propagate always-changing business requirements and workflows is removed, empowering them to build, test, and maintain data-driven functions across all business-critical applications on time.
Essentially, composability breaks down silos within organisations, enabling businesses to draw value from the interdependencies between teams and enhancing collaboration to successfully execute enterprise-wide strategies. With composability, enterprises will unify their application and services management via a single, unified control plane that can span multiple clouds, on-premises data centres, and to the edge for complete control over monitoring and security.
Furthermore, investing in technology that enables everyone across the enterprise to speak the same language and work in unison eliminates inefficiencies, reduces costs and, ultimately, unlocks digital transformation success. The sooner companies realise this, the sooner they will gain the critical competitive advantage needed to thrive under the new normal.
Power mission-critical applications with simplified data processes
Scale, flexibility, and agility are central in the thoughts of business leaders in today’s dynamic landscape. However, talent gaps and legacy systems pose hurdles. Leveraging distributed agile data management and embracing composability will propel organisations to drive growth, in line with their growing business needs.
The key for Asian enterprises in their digital transformation journey is to empower developers with solutions that simplify infrastructure and technology stacks, to enable truly agile, flexible, and robust development to keep up with changing market needs.
When businesses in the region have in place the workflows that reliably execute changing business logic under high-velocity changes in data, that is when they are able to allocate compute, storage, and memory resources efficiently. As a consequence, businesses are able to harness the full breadth of their cloud deployments, reduce overall costs, and fulfil their potential.
