by Pam Baker on March 04, 2022
Sure, IT can master the metaverse. The question is where to start? Well, right here of course …
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?
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Build Teams to Fit the Metaverse You’re Working On
Not every metaverse is equal, and so metaverse teams will require a different mix of specialties.
“IT teams may need to build skills segregated based on which metaverse they will be focusing on, such as virtual meetings, events, learning and development, collaboration, etc.,” says Yugal Joshi, partner at Everest Group, a global research firm. “They will have to build a common pool of talent that can be leveraged across all application developers, data analytics, and ML engineers, for example, but also other talent such as experience, design, and security should be aligned to the specific segment.”
5. Prepare to Build Your Own Metaverse
Yes, just like your company is now building its own AI projects, eventually you’ll need teams to build your company’s own metaverse(s). Start taking notes and seeking out the talent you’ll need now.
“There will also be instances where enterprises may want to build their own metaverse for specific segments or significantly customize an existing platform in a white-labeled model,” says Joshi.
“Here the role of IT will be significantly more critical than where a market standard platform is deployed off the shelf. IT will need to have the capabilities for such an initiative, including design and build experience for applications, infrastructure, and governance. The collaboration with business has to be significantly more than what it is today,” adds Everest Group’s Joshi.
6. Beef up Security. More Thieves Are Coming!
Cybersecurity absolutely cannot be an afterthought and nailed on after all the metaverses are up and running.
“IT needs to decide how they will handle security and the metaverse. The metaverse is predicated on the idea that there will be tons of data available to provide immersive, customized experiences. However, data is a double-edged sword and cybercriminals are always looking for new ways to steal corporate data,” says Dan Kirsch, managing director and co-founder of Techstrong Research.
That means examining every detail for vulnerabilities. Like elsewhere across the attack surface, the stakes are high and the attacks increasingly more sophisticated.
“I believe that this year we will see an increased use of the supply chain vector by nation-states and criminal organizations to deliver malware to gain access to and exploit enterprise and consumer systems — and the metaverse is no exception to this,” says Adam Golodner, Trusted Future co-chair and founder of Vortex Strategic Consulting.
“As the metaverse expands, the recent trend of cryptocurrency theft may also apply here. Vectors will include software, mobile apps, hardware, SaaS providers, and web applications,” Golodner adds.
7. Prepare To Deal With All the Same Stuff — Again
The metaverse proves once again that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
“The potential issue we see with the metaverse is that it may ultimately, for many direct consumer applications, take some of the shortcomings of our real world and just replicate them,” says Florian Douetteau, co-founder and CEO of Dataiku, a data science, machine learning, and AI company.
“I could easily imagine down the line that the metaverse for enterprise data facilitates ways to discover the data, and collaborate with others on such data, which would clearly outweigh the current limited screen-based systems,” Douetteau adds.
8. Plan On Mapping and Merging Hybrid Customer and Employee Behavioral Data
People will be existing and working in more than one universe and they may act differently in each for any number of reasons. But you’ll need to reconcile those behaviors to represent one person for yet many other reasons.
“There are straightforward ways in which IT can prepare for this world. For example, creating software that supports hybrid consumer behaviors, and ensuring that systems connect dots between the almost invisible transitions back and forth between virtual and physical realms,” says Bruno Guicardi, President & Co-Founder of CI&T, a digital transformation company with several well-known brands such as Invesco, Kohl’s, Coca-Cola, and Johnson & Johnson.
9. Continuously Work at Improving Latency
If you fail at this, people are going to throw up on your shoes. Or at least throw up on the floor. Yes, for real.
“IT departments need to address the significant hardware concerns limiting extended metaverse access. Latency, or the delay between a user’s action and the picture’s response, is especially important to limit nausea,” explains Pete Morrison, chief commercial officer at Bohemia Interactive Simulations (BISim), a developer and provider of training and simulation software products and components for defense applications.
“VR headsets have longer latency times, which means users cannot spend more than 15-20 minutes in the metaverse without feeling stress, anxiety or nausea,” Morrison adds.
10. Use Lessons From the Pandemic
Some of the lessons learned from the pandemic will help you plan, too. Think for examples of how lessons learned with videoconferencing systems may transfer to metaverse meetings. And in general, providing and protecting employees going into metaverses outside of your control too, such as for virtual business events.
“Metaverse events can be a great replacement for an on-site trade show, as you can move more quickly between the booths of interest, while still supporting the browsing that comes from strolling the aisles. Participants still need to be proactive to get the most out of such events, such as networking, just as with on-site,” says Alfred Poor, chief technology content officer at VEG: The Virtual Events Group.
IT will want to provide the means for staff to gather and store data safely from such events (from virtual business cards to promotional materials from the booths they visited) as well as protect them from picking up any malware or other issues while there.
Collected at: https://www.informationweek.com/big-data/10-ways-it-can-get-ready-for-the-metaverse?slide=1