Cisco Survey Unveiled IT Readiness to Embrace AI

TechInAfrica — Cisco has announced last week, a survey conducted to more than 2000 IT leaders and network strategists on how they plan to prioritize investment and the current state of their networks.

The company says the network is vital in today’s digital business environment. This digital era is currently driven by the exponential growth in technology performance, has become increasingly connected, digitized, distributed, and diverse. With every “thing” possessing the power to process data, compute models are poised to become dramatically more distributed and networked.

The network is essential to business success, whether in maximizing employee productivity, optimizing customer experience, or keeping data protected and secure. Simultaneously, the network is in the middle of one of its biggest evolutions since the introduction of the Internet, creating an opportunity for IT leaders and their teams to innovate.

“IT teams today are running complex mission-critical networks that are increasingly capable of providing rich data. But using that data to improve the operations, security, or business impact of the network requires new tools. That’s why IT teams are embracing intent-based networking, AI and machine learning — because the business demands it,” Garsen Naidu, Country Manager of Cisco South Africa, said.

“AI will help IT break the cycle of maintaining the status quo. Growth in spending on AI systems in the MEA region is expected to reach US$374.2-million in 2020, up from US$261.8-million in 2018 and an anticipated US$310.3-million in 2019, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC). By embracing predictive analytics and AI-based operations, IT teams will pivot from being consumed with maintaining the status quo to becoming an enabler of new business innovation. ”

The key findings from the Global Networking Trends Report and Survey:

IT leaders expect new wireless technologies, IoT and AI-enabled operations, threat detection and remediation to have the biggest impact on their network strategy and design over the next five years.
The top priority for global IT leaders and network strategists is to maximize the business value of IT and more closely align with business needs.
- Almost 40 percent of IT leaders named maximizing IT’s business value as their number one priority, higher than simplifying operations, optimizing employee productivity and minimizing security events.
- To achieve this, leaders and strategists believe investing in AI technologies is crucial. Almost 50 percent of network strategists believe increasing the use of analytics and AI will help enable the ideal network.
Intent-based networking is coming, allowing organizations to build on their software-defined networking foundations.
- 41 percent of those surveyed claim to have at least one instance of SDN in at least one of their network domains.
- Only 4 percent of respondents believe their networks have moved beyond software-defined and are intent-based today. However, 35 percent believe their networks will be fully intent-based in two years’ time.
- When asked to indicate where on Cisco’s Digital Network Readiness Model their networks currently operate, only 28 percent indicated they’ve reached a service-driven or intent-based network. However, when asked where their networks will be in two years, 78 respondents believed they would move beyond software-defined towards service-driven and intent-based networks.
IT leaders and strategists are ready to embrace AI and automation.
- Only 18 percent of IT leaders see a lack of AI maturity as an obstacle to network modernization, the lowest level of concern indicated in their responses.
- 72 percent of respondents plan to achieve AI-enabled predictive insights or prescriptive remediation within the next two years.
- 94 percent of respondents believe they will have a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) in two years. Further, 47% of SD-WAN owners plan to have an AI-optimised WAN in two years.
IT leaders and strategists aren’t concerned about a skills gap.
- Leaders and strategists expressed confidence in their teams’ abilities to address future network challenges. A third of IT leaders believe their teams are extremely well prepared to meet all the needs of an advanced network, another 40 percent believe they are well prepared and only 7 per cent believe they are not prepared at all.
- However, the skills gap remains a barrier for over a quarter of IT teams. 27 per cent of IT leaders identified a lack of necessary skills as a main obstacle to transitioning to an advanced network.
- 22 percent of IT leaders identified reskilling and upskilling to address the skills gap as a top priority. South Africa’s Department of Home Affairs has published a critical skills list containing a catalog of the country’s most needed competencies one of which is information communication and technology skills.