Digital transformationrequires constant agility, innovation, and ingenuity in order to keep up with the evolving technology and consumer landscape.

Making appropriate investments in new technologies, being able to adapt to and adopt burgeoning and emerging innovations, and ensuring systems are not just up to date, but can evolve with technology, is vital to ensure organisations are not just digitally transformed, but have the potential for continuous transformation.

It’s not so much a revolution as a constant evolution in technology. For example, what started as the cloud has now evolved into the multicloud and what started as AI-driven language models is now generative AI.

As is often touched upon, much of digital transformation revolves around understanding and harnessing what is already at the disposal of organisations: data.

“If multicloud is about managing data, hybrid working is about accessing your data, cyber is about protecting your data, and GenAI is about leveraging as much value from you data through innovation,” Stephen Bosarge, senior director at Dell Technologies, explained during his talk on the future of innovation at DIGIT’s Digital Transformation summit in Edinburgh’s Dynamic Earth on 26 October.

Bosarge hit some of the major trends encapsulating the current and future of the tech industry, and envisaged how even these concepts have changed – and will continue to change – as companies evolve and transform.

Into the MultiCloud

While small businesses, third, and public sector organisations are transitioning to the cloud-verse, Bosarge is already certain about the necessity of multicloud.

“Multicloud-by-design is the logical endpoint now,” noting how just ten years ago – 100 years in the tech world – companies were transitioning to cloud-as-a-service models as a new, innovative, and lucrative industry.

“Our purpose through the introduction of our multicloud by design strategy is to help our customers, maximise the opportunities for innovation across all cloud environments, giving them flexibility, control and choice.”

Essentially, multicloud is when a company uses multiple cloud providers for their data storage, often with different cloud stacks, typically with a mix of private and public stacks.

Often, this will mean using multiple cloud vendors to manage data across an organisation, which can prove difficult considering the nature of the current cloud market.

“We want our customers to stay in control of their digital supply chain and minimise the risks around talent and resource fragmentation,” Bosarge added. “The aim should be to maintain a sustainable exit strategy no matter what platform they buy into. Dell’s role is to rationalise architectural diversity, minimise complexity and reduce the likelihood of unexpected costs.”

That’s why Bosarge recommended Mutlicloud by design for transformation and evolution going forward, and stressed the importance of interoperability.

“Multicloud by design with interoperability is what we need,” he said, encouraging listeners at the packed Dynamic Earth to “learn and reflect on what happened over the last ten years” with the new technology.

With the future of data management clear, Bosarge moved onto the future of data access: hybrid working.

Best of Both Worlds: Hybrid Working

“Hybrid working is about access to your data,” Bosarge reiterated.

Before Covid, Dell’s idea on work was simple: work is something you do, not somewhere you go. With the pandemic, lockdown, and social isolation, this had to change.

“Now, the office is wherever you are,” referring to a backpack full of tech and office essentials, complete with laptop, notepad, and reusable coffee mug.

Working from home was a cinch for tenured and experienced staff – but new hires were struggling. What may have been a six-month onboarding turned into nine or 12 months process. Organisations were anxious that newcomers were still coming to grips with the working world, often from their bedrooms.

The view of Bosarge and Dell Technologies? “The office has a new role to play.” Dell operates on a model of three days per week in the office where possible (Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays). Newer entrants are benefitting from not only collaborating with their coworkers, but from learning from tenured staff.

“Everyone who’s tenured know its easier to work from home but it’s about what you can give to your team,” Bosarge urged.

Hybrid working is here to stay, and in many ways makes sense, offering people flexibility, the option to work remotely, and giving people more agency over their own work-life balance.

Dell details how it and other organisations manage to work from anywhere, by ensuring that every worker has access to the necessary equipment, connection, and network.

But by doing so, this created more vulnerabilities, meaning organisations have to relook at how they  can protect their data.

Cyber: With Great Power Comes Great Vulnerabilities

With the advent of remote and hybrid working, more endpoints are created and with more endpoints, come more vulnerabilities.

Cyber, Bosarge said, is about how companies protect their data, and this task is becoming increasingly pertinent and complicated. As he cited, the UK is the second most hacked economy outside the US, and cyber-attacks become more costly each year.

Further, 90% of data breachers appear to be the result of human error, Bosarge told the audience. The creation of more endpoints creates more potential for human error to lead to greater disasters and has made cyber an evermore paramount issue for tech specialists, and the price tag is heavy.

The National Cyber Security Council (NCSC) estimates that cybersecurity failures cost the UK economy £27 billion, with ransomware costing the most. And with other advancements in technology, like generative AI, reputable organisations are not the only ones benefiting from more powerful technologies.

Voice biometrics, complex and advanced social engineering techniques, better phishing emails – AI is ushering in a new age of cybersecurity issues and concerns.

At DIGIT’s Scot-Secure West Summit, an AI model could reproduce the voice of DIGIT Founder Ray Bugg, allowing it to say anything in a believable rendition of Ray’s voice, from what football team he liked to authorising a payment.

“The dark web is more sophisticated than the good web,” Bosarge warned. “They think about these things, these applications, and it’s up to us to respond.”

Bosarge also touched on the common misconceptions around cybersecurity and the cloud.

“You’re responsible for your company’s cloud data,” he said. “Read your contracts. If cloud goes down, it’s your responsibility.” He suggested to the leaders at the DIGIT summit to check their cloud provider’s cyber offerings and ensure that they have proper mitigations in place for data loss in the event of a cyber incident.

With an increase in endpoints, human error, and advancements in generative AI, cyber has become an all-encompassing issue.

GenAI – The New Frontier

But generative AI in itself is a massive subject worthy of exploring – and that is why the media, international governments, and businesses, have been consistently discussing some of its most recent advancements, potential, and risks ad nauseum.

Bosarge agrees with most tech experts when he says generative AI is going to have a profound impact on the tech industry, and the world, but he goes further to explain what generative AI requires from the tech industry to be so ground-breaking.

“To do Gen AI well, you need two things: you need quite a lot of power and computational capability.”

This means organisaitons must consider their power consumption and as a result, their energy efficiency, and build this into their design.

Power and computational capability are both essentially infrastructure problems. In order for Gen AI to function, it requires advanced graphics processing units (GPU)s – “but demand is far outstripping supply,” Bosarge warned. And this demand with the rise of AI has caused a transformation in the industry.

“Cloud providers want to become GPUs-as-a-service providers. They are looking at setting up near windfarms, cloudflares, to harness unused power for data centres,” Bosarge said.

The new priority makes sense – generative AI is anticipated to be a $1 trillion opportunity, Bosarge told audience members.

GPUs make generative AI possible. As opposed to central processing units (CPUs) which handle tasks in a linear fashion, GPUs handle tasks in parallel, and can run against a neural network, building the foundation for the groundbreaking 2017 Transformer paper which started Gen AI as we know it, Bosarge reminded us.

With more power, and as the data processing capabilities of GPUs expand, AI can continue to proliferate, expand from regurgitating a single sentence to entire novels, from generating an abstract painting to a photograph that can fool law enforcement.

The move to create data centres and processing units that are capable of harnessing more data is paramount to the continual advancement of AI, as well as enabling more and more organisations to take advantage of the tech as it currently stands.

“Data is the most critical and most powerful part of everything,” Bosarge reiterated, “we just need to figure out how to use it.”