As pandemic continues, digital transformation to take the mainstream

No matter where we live, the pandemic has affected every person – the children most of all. Millions are missing out on basic health services, education and protection simply because they were born into poverty or because of their ethnicity, religion or race. Hybrid models will be the new mantra of working style. We’re going to witness more compelling virtual and hybrid experiences to reach the customers and engage the employees. Two years have passed since the Covid-19 pandemic broke out, thereby disrupting the daily lives and working patterns of millions of people.

Many sectors have made a shift to working from home even as millions lost their jobs. We still don't know if and when we will return to normal life. Today, the key questions before the workers and employers are will they go to the office again - and, if so, when or how often? The year 2022 seems, companies will increasingly embrace new business models, and so will the entire partner community. Customer outcomes will become the main business drivers. Agility and flexibility will be the key differentiators, and partners will become business enablers.

Thriving partners will act as trusted advisors to their customers enabling them to get all the benefits of the emerging XaaS model wherever they want and need their apps and data to be. It's about choice. Everything is going digital, and it is all about data. The power of data and data analytics will become even more important and ubiquitous to provide customers and partners precious insights.

Especially at the edge, where data is being generated faster than it can be acted upon. An intelligent IT infrastructure that can harness and manage data to gain insights is critical for businesses moving into 2022. Organizations are looking to trusted local partners to provide cloud offerings with the same advantages of agility and scale offered by hyperscalers. Locally managed clouds offer the familiar, personalized experience customers expect from channel partners, as well as compliance with security, governance and regulatory factors. As partners accelerate their own transformation, they have options, too.

Going forward, in the coming years, this decentralized and hybrid approach leveraging ecosystems is likely to be a dominant trend, with data sovereignty, security and compliance as some of the key drivers.Data that is collected, processed and managed at the edge is expected to grow to more than 50% by 2023, according to Gartner.

Edge-driven data helps make decisions faster, leading to better experiences and outcomes. By sharing learnings from one organization to another, various industries can unite and further improve intelligence that can have a tremendous impact for the greater good. However, because most organizations have to meet regulatory and compliance requirements, mandating that data stay at its location, sharing insights externally can raise a challenge.

Experts predict that there will be a new term of swarm learning technology, a decentralized machine learning framework that enables organizations to use distributed data to build machine learning models, will gain adoption as it allows for only the learnings captured from edge data to be shared rather than the data itself through blockchain technology. Having this capability to learn in an equitable way, while gaining data governance, is critical to industries that handle sensitive data. For example, in hospitals, learnings derived from imaging records, CT and MRI scans, gene expression data, and more, can be shared from one hospital to another to improve diagnostics of diseases and other ailments, while protecting patient information and preventing biases to occur.

Taking a swarm learning approach can also deliver great benefits to other industries, such as the banking and financial services sector, where organizations can fight the annual credit card fraud of $35 billion by sharing fraud-related learnings privately.” 

Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu, President & CEO, VARINDIA