For businesses, capabilities of machine learning, powered by petabytes of data and insanely fast computing resources will impact consumer experiences, biotech research, financial modeling and myriad other applications. Key to this is letting AI remove the mundane tasks and letting existing specialist human teams focus on other factors critical for business growth and development.

Multi-cloud environments will become the norm: Over the last year we have really seen the normalization of cloud technology as an enabler for business and availability technology. Enterprises will no longer ask themselves if they will be moving to the cloud platform, but when and how. With the popularity of the cloud accelerating dramatically, more applications will be built specifically for the platform, cloud technologies will become more scalable for businesses and we will see a rise in artificial technology. Businesses will be turning to a scalable data recovery and back-up solution that is able to support their transformation into cloud technology. No single cloud platform is perfect for every workload. The tools and platforms for managing them will continue to mature and drive more seamless integration across clouds.

Enterprises will make avoiding outages and systems failures a top priority: The changes to the Notifiable Data Breaches Act in Australia will require organizations to mandatory report whenever there’s a key breach. With reputation at the front of their minds, you can bet that CEOs will have outage, breach and systems failure prevention top of mind in 2018.

As the US pulls away from international trade agreements, other regions will start to take the lead in global business: Increasingly, the United States is pulling away from international cooperation, with trade agreements like NAFTA taking center stage in this retreat. If these agreements unravel, other countries will not hesitate to take advantage. China and the EU will fill the leadership void, increasingly putting the U.S. and U.S.-based companies, of which many are technology companies, at a disadvantage in global trade.

Smart VC money will begin flowing away from “unicorns” and toward startups: Venture capitalists are starting to look with greater interest at smart, nimble startups where the pricing is more favorable and the opportunities are larger. What’s more, they are funding these organizations early and supporting them all the way through until they exit, without forming a syndicate with other investors.

So what does this all mean for enterprises in the next 12 months—if a cyclone or storm, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack or other major breaches and a catastrophic regional power failure all strike at once? Customers and users the world over won’t care what issues strike – they expect the information and ability to transact to be there when they want it, and it's frighteningly easy to simply move to the competitor.

Availability isn't a choice, it’s a base requirement and the time for it is now.