10 Ways IT Can Get Ready for the Metaverse

摘要： Sure, IT can master the metaverse. The question is where to start? Well, right here of course …

▲圖片標題(來源：Dancing Man via Alamy Stock)

Many in IT suspect that the metaverse is just another data silo filled with Second Life left-overs, security threats galore, compliance black holes, communication flubs, data leaks, and technical glitches. You know, pretty much everything IT works with now times two! But for better or worse, business as usual now includes building and using parallel universes. Yes, that’s plural universes and likely multi-headaches, too.

“The IT teams need to understand market platforms offering metaverse services at least across virtual meetings, events, learning and development, and collaboration. Good thing is some of the vendors, such as Microsoft, who are taking lead in collaboration-based metaverse are well understood by IT teams,” says Yugal Joshi, partner at Everest Group, a global research firm.

There’s likely plenty of opportunity ahead for IT pros to earn some serious otherworldly street cred for making business work in multiple universes. Fortunately, you have all that digitalization, digital twinning, IoT, and edge computing experience to draw from, because at least that’s a start.

“IT teams will need to understand not only the tech but the business aspects of the fundamental building blocks of metaverse, such as digital assets, for example NFT, blockchain, payments, marketplace, AR/VR, sensors, spatial computing, digital twins, etc.,” Joshi says.

Besides the obvious tasks in outer office space universe-building, Buzz Lightyear, what else does an overworked IT pro need to know and do to prepare for the avalanche of metaverses?

Double Down on the Digital Twinning

At least initially, any metaverse built in a business context is mostly just a copy of the real world, so copy everything you’re doing now.

“The metaverse is not as elusive or futuristic as it seems. When you consider the fundamentals of how we create, communicate, and collaborate in the digital world, the metaverse is simply a more immersive and personalized version of how we already work. We have been on this journey to a digital society for some time already, and businesses should be proactive in planning for it now,” says Salim Elkhou, CEO of Onna, a producer of a search platform by the same name that enables real-time search across multiple repositories for use in eDiscovery and across legal departments.

Make a Cheat Sheet

“Take your lead from what people already do, both online and offline,” says David Luchatch, CEO & Co-Founder of Liquid Avatar Technologies, a digital identity verification and validation company. “Study what your customers, colleagues, friends, and family are doing currently with gaming, education and commerce and then imagine how an Avatar of yourself, or them would interact with others in a virtual environment.”

“Measure and monitor vulnerabilities, repeatable actions and then map those against your current technology roadmap and see how you fair and what needs to improve to meet the expectations of the metaverse,” Luchatch adds.

Plan to Redo Your Data Infrastructure

Yep, even the metaverse is built on data. You were expecting otherwise?

“Once business leaders have worked out how they will incorporate metaverse technology into their organizations, the entire data center infrastructure -- from real estate to power distribution and cooling, to 24/7 monitoring services -- will need to adapt to the metaverse,” warns Adam Compton, Director of Strategy at Schneider Electric, a global company specializing in energy management and automation.

“While this may sound daunting, digital transformation, aided by edge computing, will help enable these changes. Edge computing serves as a faster, more effective alternative to cloud computing solutions. In fact, data center solutions that are being built in the cloud will need to extend out into an edge environment to meet the demand from metaverse technologies.” Compton adds.

轉貼自： Information Week