David Joosten, director of the Americas and partner markets at Vodafone Business, identifies key trends that will shape the digital enterprise market in 2024, as follows…
1 | 5G and IoT will benefit society more than AI
The convergence of 5G and IoT will create more opportunities than we’ll see from AI in 2024. Increased network speeds at the edge will bring higher-quality connectivity to healthcare facilities, manufacturing environments, transportation, and more, saving more lives, producing more goods and services, and creating safer and more reliable ways to move people around cities and countries. In many sectors, AI will instead complement the benefits of 5G and IoT, particularly in industrial and automotive industries.
2 | Cloud partnerships will dominate telecoms
As edge investments accelerate across industries, telecoms will look to deepen cloud partnerships as a fast win-win in the race to capture greater market share in digital services. These partnerships will need to consider issues such as data sovereignty, interoperability and the need for standardization, but the benefits will far outweigh the challenges as telecom companies face an urgent need to innovate as increased competition comes from non-traditional players.
3 | Infrastructure investments will rebound
While cloud deployments make up nearly half of enterprise workloads and have received the bulk of IT leader investments over the past decade, in 2024, IT leaders will return to prioritizing their physical infrastructure needs alongside comprehensive cybersecurity strategies. The emergence of SASE in response to recent high-profile security incidents will cause leaders to reevaluate PoP strategies and ensure a greater balance between cloud and network deployments. New advancements in cloud security will continue to influence the balance between physical and virtual infrastructure.
