Q: What are the key components of modern data center operations during the rise of AI?
With the adoption of new technology comes a lot of change, but there are themes that always remain no matter what. First and foremost, as more consumers and businesses enter the AI realm and their reliance on it grows, resiliency in the infrastructure and application stack remains the most important element.
As AI hardware stacks are adopted using GPUs and other supporting hardware, the power requirements increase significantly. When those requirements increase, it puts more stress on the power and cooling systems. Power upgrades and liquid cooling will become more prevalent.
Q: How are embedded finance and real-time payments going to affect ecommerce in the future?
Embedded finance is a way to describe a more seamless connectivity and introduction of financial services and payment channels, delivered through traditionally non-financial outlets. This allows consumers greater choice and convenience when choosing how to pay for or receive more opportunity to use additional financial products. These channels may be embedded in what are traditionally non-financial entry points such as retail outlets, insurance, etc., and help deliver financial services through these outlets. An example would be receiving offers for loans, payment plans, or insurance upon checkout. This offers businesses more revenue streams and consumers additional opportunity to obtain adjacent services.
Q: Where are we landing with cloud use now?
Cloud use and growth continue across the industry, but companies are getting smarter about how and when to use cloud services and how to maximize the value and opportunity that cloud-native apps can provide. A few years ago there was a bit of a rush to move everything to the cloud, and many of those moves were made as lift-and-shift or were made with shorter-term benefits used as justification.
Depending on what the app or service is used for and how that use impacts cloud consumption and cost structure, it impacts the long-term use case and viability of hosting that application outside of on-premises locations. At the end of the day, a tech org's job is to deliver the most efficient and scalable solution and do so in a way that maintains the revenue margins as that consumption grows. The worst case scenario is getting into a situation where you have reduced your margins by putting a service in the cloud.
When done correctly, with the appropriate understanding of the product and how it is used and priced and understanding the costs with appropriate consumption projections and the right cloud-native architecture, it's extremely beneficial.
Also, more tech orgs are creating their own on-premises private cloud installations which provide close to the same speed to deployment using virtualization and hyperscale technology to place workloads where they want to be able to better control costs in certain models.
This is where the permit-to-operate process in a company is so important, and as part of that a Cloud Business Office which weighs all these factors and results in the best direction for the deployment of certain technology.
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