IDC PeerScape: Practices to Align Digital Infrastructure Spending for AI and Next-Generation Workloads with Business Priorities

This IDC PeerScape examines practices that two forward-looking senior enterprise leaders are implementing to ensure strong alignment between their business priorities and the digital infrastructure investments being made to support emerging data- and compute-intensive workloads, including AI. These practices include:Proactively include infrastructure considerations in the broader strategic business decision-making and budgeting processesDefine and enforce consistent policies for maintaining data integrity and optimizing data-driven decision-makingOvercome infrastructure tech debt by using workload containerization for portability and scale"The compute- and data-intensive needs of many AI and next-generation workloads demand flexible, hybrid, and multicloud infrastructure resources that can scale and adapt as the needs of the workloads evolve," explains Mary Johnston Turner, research vice president, Future of Digital Infrastructure, IDC. "Implementing consistent companywide policies and automation to standardize workload deployments, data integrity, cost optimization, sustainability, cyber-resiliency, and compliance controls will be critical to creating a competitive next-generation enterprise infrastructure platform."