For almost a decade now, global business leaders have heralded the beginning of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which refers to how technologies like AI, robotics, IoT, autonomous vehicles and computer vision are blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres. Industry 4.0 has paved the way for transformative changes in business, unleashing advances in business process automation in the front and back office, driving unprecedented productivity and growth.

The road to the data-driven enterprise is not for the faint of heart. The continuous waves of data pounding into ever-complex hybrid multicloud environments only compound the ongoing challenges of management, governance, security, skills, and rising costs, to name a few. But Hitachi Vantara has developed a path forward that combines cloud-ready infrastructure, cloud consulting and managed services to optimize applications for resiliency and performance, and automated dataops innovations.

Organizations today face challenges from rapidly changing markets, new technologies, and the need to build new modern apps running in a multicloud environment. For this reason, business leaders are demanding faster delivery of new applications, services, and insight, requiring greater agility and efficiency from IT. Enterprises, rightly so, are investing in modernizing their on-premises infrastructure with increased use of the cloud.

Although many enterprises are at varying stages in their cloud journeys, most are adopting distributed mixes of on-premises and public cloud environments in order to maintain certain data and applications close by, while making others more accessible and available online. With such distributed cloud networks, core tenants of the enterprise, such as management, scalability and security, become increasingly challenging. There is a path forward, however.

Any software application must work properly, generate the right results, satisfy stakeholders, and fit into the organization's overall objectives. Automated testing can help. It may sound easy, but we all know that achieving all of the above takes a lot of effort. Can we take a shortcut without compromising quality or causing costs to explode?