Research from the Equinix Global Tech Trends Survey (GTTS) shows that 81% of EMEA IT leaders see future-proofing their business as a top priority for their technology strategy, but the question remains – how future ready is your business considering the imminent economical changes and the evolving technology trends?
According to the GTTS finding, IT leaders in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) found these three major areas as the most common future-proofing challenges named by EMEA IT leaders:
- Complying with data regulations (83%)
- Improving cybersecurity (83%)
- Improving customer experience (82%)
This survey shows that to be digitally ready, businesses in EMEA must prioritize compliance, cybersecurity, user experience and sustainability to stay competitive. Let’s dive deeper into these priorities examining their current challenges and how to overcome them in the EMEA region.
Regulatory Compliance
Ecosystems have become essential to business success, whether it’s collaborating with partners to drive innovation or tapping into cloud and SaaS providers for greater performance and new services on demand. Businesses in EMEA now face the challenge of taking advantage of digital ecosystems while staying on the right side of data privacy laws. EMEA businesses must balance their compliance requirements against the need to share data across their digital ecosystems.
MDXi Data Centers are fully GDPR compliant and enables businesses in the West African region stay compliant with local regulatory laws.
Cybersecurity
In its Threat Landscape 2022 report, the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) mentioned a new wave of “hacktivism” driven by the conflict. The frequency and intensity of cyberattacks businesses in the EMEA region is becoming alarming, especially cyberattacks for monetary gain, with the ongoing military conflict between Ukraine and Russia creating additional vulnerabilities.
IT leaders need a holistic security strategy that protects both their digital assets and their physical infrastructure. Preventing data breaches is a particular area of concern, both because of the data protection regulations mentioned above and because of the high costs and reputational damage that inevitably follow such incidents.
MDXi Data Center security provides strict layers of access controls, thus preventing unauthorized access to customer equipment.
User experience
Over 9-in-10 IT decision-makers in Nigeria consider improving customer experience to be among the top priorities, according to the Equinix GTTS Nigeria report
Customers demand highly customized services to be constantly provided across a variety of digital platforms. In the digital economy, offering this seamless client experience may help an organization stand out from the competition.
Businesses require dispersed digital infrastructure across important sites to deliver a better customer experience.
Sustainability
4 out of 5 IT decision-makers in Nigeria GTTS say that #sustainability is now one of their organization’s most important drivers.
The data center industry has made tremendous strides in increasing energy efficiency. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), energy used by data centers only increased by 10-60% between 2015 and 2021, despite a 440% increase in internet traffic over the same time.
MDXi, an Equinix Company Data Center is proud to take the lead in making data centers cleaner and more efficient in West Africa with the use of renewable energy. Equinix has reached 95% renewable energy coverage globally, including 100% renewable coverage in EMEA.
Next Steps?
Although we have a reasonable notion of the difficulties EMEA firms can have in 2023, being a future-proof business is more about being prepared for everything. This entails building an agile, adaptable digital infrastructure that enables you to respond to any emerging challenge by staying compliant, secure, managing user experience to ensure sustainability.
You can read more about future proofing your business priorities here.
MDXi, an Equinix Company can get your started on these four priorities for your business at our carrier-neutral Data Centers in Nigeria, Ghana, and Cote d’ivoire.
Want to future-proof your business? Talk to an expert here