Technology leaders from Akamai forecast what the evolution of AI and the cloud would spell for Asia Pacific organizations in the New Year ahead.
With Asia Pacific leading in hybrid and multi-cloud adoption, and set to lead the way in the adoption of AI in the year to come, challenges may abound.
From ensuring AI literacy to address deepfakes, and the need for talent with expertise to deal with cloud complexity and increasing compute performance demands, CIOs and business leaders would do well to take some notes for the New Year 2024:
Dr Robert Blumofe, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, offers a nugget of wisdom for generative AI in the region:
● Building AI literacy will be critical for the future of the Internet
Asia Pacific has often led the globe when it comes to embracing new technologies, and generative AI has been no exception – IDC notes that the Asia Pacific region is leading the way on genAI, with two-thirds of companies already investing in genAI or exploring potential use cases.
But as generative AI tools like DALL-E and ChatGPT become more pervasive and common, organizations will also need to invest in AI literacy to maintain customer trust. AI will make it harder to verify what is real and what is fake.
Asia Pacific has the opportunity to lead the way here, too, and ensure deepfakes don’t undermine legitimate businesses and help everyone separate fact from fiction.
Jay Jenkins, Chief Technology Officer, Cloud Computing, has three tips for what lies ahead:
● Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud adoption will lead to distributed architectures
Enterprises are now diving headfirst into the realm of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies by strategically weaving together the finest offerings from different cloud providers tailored to their business needs.
This trend is set to continue well into 2024, as organizations embark on a quest to fine-tune their cloud expenditures, elevate the effectiveness and dependability of their applications.
As the approach matures, it’s not just about optimizing costs — it’s a journey toward technical and operational agility to unlock the full potential of distributed architectures. Embracing distributed compute is merely the prelude; the key to success depends on the widespread adoption of distributed databases, which should provide the foundation for developers to create innovative architectural models.
The cloud revolution is not just about adoption, but a combination of optimization and architectural evolution.
● Compute performance demands will be escalated
Meeting the escalating performance demands of applications has become a formidable challenge for enterprises in the modern landscape. This is a primary concern that revolves around the adverse consequences stemming from subpar user experiences.
Modern consumers anticipate, and in certain instances demand, flawlessly smooth and highly responsive interactions with applications. Any delays in this regard can lead to dissatisfaction and a decline in trust towards the brand.
This challenge will likely evolve in 2024 as enterprises embrace the proliferation of interconnected devices, which are all reliant on real-time data exchange across distributed systems to deliver a satisfactory user experience, ensuring that reliable and efficient communication among machines becomes indispensable.
● Immediate demand for expertise to keep up with cost of compute
As businesses increasingly turn to cloud infrastructure and services, the collective expenses associated with data storage, computing power, and egress bandwidth can swiftly strain financial resources and impact overall profitability.
Beyond the immediate financial challenges posed by computational costs, concerns with vendor lock-in and reliance on specific cloud providers or proprietary technologies and abstractions can also make transitioning to alternative solutions challenging, resulting in substantial migration expenses or operational disruptions.
