Businesses are accelerating their shift to digital systems across all areas of their business, and IT is changing focus from an operations center to becoming an innovation enabler. As this shift happens, most new enterprise applications are being developed to cloud-native principles based on standardized platforms, runtimes, and integrated orchestration. However, European infrastructure is still being bought, built, and operated largely on client-server principles, with limited integration and automation, making adaptation to changing business needs long, complex, and costly. IDC's Europe: Future of Digital Infrastructure research program highlights business and IT leadership perspectives on how changes in cloud, datacenter, network, edge, and AI/ML-powered infrastructure and operations are being used to enable and accelerate business agility, resilience, and innovation.

• The shift of private IT infrastructure to an "as-a-service" model
• The impact of self-driving, autonomous operations using AI/ML-powered observability and automation for cost, performance, and security optimization
• The evolution of cloud and digital infrastructure governance, KPIs, and vendor sourcing best practices
• Hybrid and public cloud

• The role of hybrid cloud in a modern European IT infrastructure
• IDC PeerScape: Best Practices in Adopting Self-Driving Autonomous Automation in Europe
• IDC Survey: 2022 — The Progress of Digital Infrastructure in Europe
• Progress in Sustainable Datacenters in Europe

In addition to the insight provided in this service, IDC may conduct research on specific topics or emerging market segments via research offerings that require additional IDC funding and client investment.

1. What are the most important digital infrastructure technology trends impacting business digitalization success?
2. What cultural changes are needed to ensure success with digital infrastructure?
3. How does the increasing maturity of AI-enabled analytics/operations across compute, data, and network infrastructure alter IT management and governance best practices?
4. How will public cloud vendors' cloud stacks influence the evolution of private cloud?
5. How quickly and deeply will the impact of cloud-native applications and platforms be felt?
6. What impact will the shift to more flexible/as-a-service consumption of infrastructure have on the end-to-end utilization of digital infrastructure assets and services?