The Makings of a Successful Organization in 2027 and Beyond

At first glance, the successful organizations of tomorrow look much the same as today’s. They’re still delivering exceptional customer value. They’re still innovating. They’re staying agile and flexible in the face of a constant barrage of technological, political and societal shifts. And they’re doing that because they thought about how today’s “what-ifs” become tomorrow’s reality. 

That’s not easy.

Defining a successful organization in 2027 and beyond

In 2027, it’s reasonable to assume that even more of the world will be digitized — most of it, in fact. In such a world, the most successful organizations will have figured out how to accelerate innovation velocity and quality to differentiate their customer experience.

These organizations will have something in common: They’ll operate in environments that are complex — a combination of hybrid, multi-vendor best in class applications requiring integration and interoperability. They will require visibility across the entire digital footprint and architect workflows enabling agility so they can bypass problems quickly and take advantage of new opportunities in an accelerating digital world. 

One of the most promising opportunities is AI, which can profoundly expedite and enhance decision-making, helping to boost the end-user experience and catalyze greater digital resilience. Successful organizations will use AI and analytics as a competitive advantage by using it in their operational activities every single day while managing its use and development with strong guiding principles.

Navigating an evolving risk landscape

The future will also belong to organizations that overcome many known and unknown challenges. For one, geopolitical conflicts will increasingly be fought on the cyber front, and we will see more organized groups exploit growing attack surfaces with creative tactics that can infiltrate, disrupt and compromise critical infrastructure.

At the same time, with digital as the backbone of national economies, government regulations will continue to evolve. These will put more pressure on the C-suite to comply with stringent requirements for how best to prepare for and operate through adverse events. All of this will occur amidst a backdrop of the unknown unknowns — like the potential for quantum attacks or malicious AI or any number of global crises we won’t see coming.

In such a world, digital resilience truly is enterprise resilience.

Getting ahead of the game: four key technology challenges in 2027

The companies that will be the most successful in the future will surmount four key challenges as they treat digital resilience as a strategic advantage, rather than simply a safety imperative.

1. Navigating complexity

Every large organization will operate across multi-cloud, hybrid, and on-prem environments, while having to detect, investigate, and respond faster than ever before. However, teams can’t manage what they can’t see. Teams that continue to use many different tools will be left with a fragmented view across complex ecosystems that make it difficult to secure and monitor it all. These visibility challenges can lead to critical issues that can derail trust and hinder speed-to-market.

2. Understanding data value

Large enterprises are forecast to triple their unstructured data capacity across their on-prem, edge, and public cloud locations by 2026, as compared to 2023. Ballooning data volumes makes it more complicated to understand how to manage and use data to stay compliant and build digital resilience. 

To manage cost and compliance, and to be able to use their data for different use cases, organizations would have to spend too much money trying to get it all in one place with current approaches — or even have to store data multiple times. This will strain an organization’s resources as teams struggle to know what data to put where, how to keep it all in sync, and most importantly, how to make it valuable.

3. Mitigating risk in real time

Static risk assessments aren’t enough — and will be even less so in the future — as executives must comply with ever-evolving regulatory requirements while managing increasing corporate and personal risk. To navigate the evolving risk landscape and stay compliant with new reporting and regulatory requirements, a wider set of stakeholders need to access and understand real-time insights regarding the organization’s risk status.

4. Managing AI innovation

As every organization eventually deploys AI in some fashion, it will need to be carefully monitored and secured to protect users, organizations and society. 

The dynamic nature of AI technology is both a boon to innovation and a challenge: Organizations need to be particularly careful when monitoring for compliance and make sure they have a handle on potentially harmful vulnerabilities, biases, and hallucinations. Therefore, innovation is only valuable if digital products are trustworthy and reliable. In such a world, digital resilience will truly be enterprise resilience.

A vision for the future

There will certainly be challenges. There always are. We all know that new technology brings with it risks as well as rewards. However, I have a vision for what the future holds. I see an abundance of opportunities for companies that are willing to plan for and invest ahead of tomorrow’s unknown challenges. The future is yours and we look forward to working with you to bring it to life.

Join us at .conf24 to learn how Splunk’s product vision will help organizations tackle these challenges and more.