Technology

From cloud computing adoption to automation, outsourcing, and infrastructure optimization, IT teams in 2025 must navigate a landscape shaped by emerging technologies, economic pressures, and evolving cybersecurity threats.

According to Gartner, 81% of boards have yet to make significant progress in their digital transformation efforts, highlighting the ongoing challenge of balancing technology investment with broader business needs.

With budgets under scrutiny, CIOs must be more strategic than ever. Assessing your organization’s tech infrastructure is a crucial step in setting up for the year ahead, ensuring time and money are used efficiently. Here’s how to stay ahead.

1. Adopt cloud-based functions

Moving IT management to the cloud is a strategic way to reduce costs, improve efficiency, and enhance scalability. The financial case is clear—global spending on public cloud services is projected to hit $805 billion in 2024, with expectations to double by 2028. Rather than investing in costly on-premises hardware and maintenance, businesses can benefit from a subscription-based model that offers flexibility and operational agility.

Cloud adoption enables companies to deploy services quickly without the upfront costs and logistical challenges of in-house IT infrastructure management. It also provides elasticity, allowing organizations to scale resources up or down based on demand—an advantage for businesses with fluctuating workloads. Additionally, cloud platforms streamline IT management by offloading tasks such as backups, disaster recovery, and security monitoring to cloud providers.

However, moving to the cloud requires careful planning. Businesses must consider vendor lock-in risks, data sovereignty laws, and compliance requirements, especially in regulated industries. Hybrid and multi-cloud strategies can help mitigate these risks by providing greater flexibility and control. To ensure a smooth migration, proper documentation is essential—clear records of server roles, dependencies, and access controls help teams transition efficiently while maintaining operational integrity.

2. Automate administrative tasks

The adoption of IT automation has become a central focus for organizations aiming to enhance efficiency and reduce costs. IDC reports that in 2024, a significant 91% of organizations have established centralized IT automation teams, reflecting its growing importance.

IT automation not only streamlines routine tasks like software deployment, system monitoring, and user account management but also helps businesses overcome skill shortages by maximizing the efficiency of existing teams. Automated patch management, monitoring, and identity and access management (IAM) systems reduce manual workload, allowing IT teams to focus on high-value projects rather than repetitive tasks. Automating help desk functions with chatbots and ticket triaging speeds up issue resolution while scheduled backups and disaster recovery processes ensure business continuity with minimal intervention.

Security and compliance tasks also benefit from automation, with tools handling network configuration, log analysis, and threat detection in real time. Auto-scaling in cloud environments adjusts resources based on demand, optimizing costs and performance. Device provisioning can also be automated, allowing new employees to receive fully configured systems instantly. By reducing manual work, IT teams can focus on strategic initiatives rather than routine maintenance.

3. Use asset management tools

The IT Asset Management software (ITAM) market is projected to reach USD 2.9 billion by 2032, highlighting its growing role in optimizing IT resources and reducing costs. With increasingly complex IT infrastructures, businesses rely on asset management tools to track and manage hardware and software efficiently, leading to significant savings.

Integrating ITAM solutions with Active Directory (AD) enhances visibility and control over IT assets, making it easier to monitor user access, software usage, and device status across an organization. This allows IT teams to identify underutilized hardware, reassign software licenses, and cancel redundant subscriptions, ensuring optimal resource allocation. Additionally, AD integration streamlines the decommissioning of outdated hardware and automates compliance reporting.

By reducing manual asset tracking, businesses save both time and money while strengthening security and operational efficiency.

4. Evaluate IT infrastructure

Beyond managing IT assets, assessing the infrastructure that supports them is essential for cost savings and operational efficiency. A well-documented and optimized IT environment helps organizations track performance, identify inefficiencies, and ensure resources are used effectively.

For businesses hosting their own hardware, virtualization technologies like VMware or Hyper-V maximize resource utilization by running multiple virtual machines on a single physical server, reducing hardware sprawl and energy costs. Cloud and hybrid IT models also provide opportunities to offload non-critical workloads to lower-cost environments.

Infrastructure mapping tools, such as network topology diagrams and hardware architecture maps, enhance visibility and troubleshooting. A centralized IT documentation platform provides real-time visibility into server usage, data flows, and dependencies, helping IT teams evaluate workloads, streamline resource allocation, and prevent unnecessary expenditures.

5. Outsource your service management

Outsourcing IT management to an MSP allows businesses to reduce costs, access specialized expertise, and ensure round-the-clock support. MSPs provide predictable IT expenses, eliminating the need for large capital investments in infrastructure and personnel. They also offer cybersecurity, compliance management, and disaster recovery solutions, making them ideal for regulated industries like healthcare, finance, and legal. Companies with remote teams or global operations benefit from 24/7 monitoring and rapid issue resolution, while growing businesses can scale IT services without the delays of hiring and training in-house staff.

The businesses that benefit most from MSPs are small and mid-sized companies, startups, and organizations where IT is not a core function, such as retail, hospitality, and manufacturing. Highly regulated industries gain compliance assurance, while businesses with fluctuating workloads can quickly adjust IT resources. MSPs also improve business continuity by managing backup solutions and disaster recovery plans. For companies seeking cost efficiency, security, and scalability, outsourcing IT management can free up internal teams to focus on business growth and innovation.

A proactive IT strategy to embrace change

As IT teams navigate the challenges of 2025, the key to efficiency and cost savings lies in strategic decision-making. Cloud adoption, automation, IT asset management, infrastructure optimization, and outsourcing each offer unique advantages in reducing operational overhead while improving scalability and security. By leveraging cloud-based solutions, businesses can cut hardware costs and gain flexibility.

Automating routine tasks enhances productivity and helps IT teams manage growing workloads without additional hiring. Asset management tools ensure resources are fully utilized, while infrastructure evaluations optimize system performance. Meanwhile, outsourcing IT services to an MSP can provide expert support and financial predictability for businesses looking to streamline operations.

In a time of tightening budgets and increasing digital demands, a proactive IT strategy is essential. Organizations that embrace these approaches will be better positioned to reduce inefficiencies, enhance security, and support business growth without unnecessary expenditure. Whether by refining internal processes or outsourcing critical functions, investing in smarter IT management will allow businesses to stay competitive, agile, and future-ready in an evolving digital landscape.

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This article was produced as part of TechRadarPro's Expert Insights channel where we feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today. The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/news/submit-your-story-to-techradar-pro

Lost among the hype of the AI tools and the cloud revolution, one critical question is being overlooked: how many dimensions can your storage system scale?

Most enterprise storage systems are designed to scale in at most two key dimensions — capacity (how much data can be stored) and performance (how quickly data can be accessed). Driven by the complex, dynamic and unpredictable nature of AI workloads and cloud-native applications, there’s been a dramatic shift in the demands placed on storage infrastructure. Storage systems built for an earlier era are now being stretched and strained in ways their designers could never have anticipated. These unprecedented demands can’t be met by simply adding sheer capacity or raw performance.

What does this mean for your organization? To keep pace with emerging workloads and unknown future requirements, your storage infrastructure must scale — without tradeoffs — in any dimension that might be conceivably required.

What is “multidimensional scaling” in data storage?

We’ve observed an uptick in customers who’ve come to us after running into one or more limitations in their outdated, inflexible storage infrastructure. This experience has helped us identify ten distinct dimensions that a storage system must be able to seamlessly scale in order to adapt to whatever the future might throw at it:

• Capacity
• Storage compute
• Applications
• Metadata
• S3 objects
• S3 buckets
• S3 authentications per second
• Throughput
• Objects per second
• Systems management

The ability to scale across these ten dimensions can be referred to as multidimensional scaling.

Future-ready storage: three ways multidimensional scaling powers business growth Technical explanations of each of the ten dimensions can be found in our whitepaper. Instead, let’s explore a few concrete examples of how multidimensional scaling can save your organization time, money, and headaches.

1. Have the flexibility to handle any future demand

The pace of technological change makes it nearly impossible to predict future storage requirements. Workloads that barely existed five years ago — like generative AI and real-time analytics — now dominate IT management discussions. Businesses that commit to rigid storage architectures risk being unprepared for what comes next.

Multidimensional scaling equips organizations with the flexibility to adapt to evolving requirements. Need to onboard a new AI data pipeline with microsecond latencies? Scaling access speeds ensures the infrastructure is ready. Launching a cloud-native application that spans geographies? Scaling authentication requests allows for secure, seamless global access.

This adaptability not only prevents expensive data migration but also empowers businesses to innovate without being constrained by their storage infrastructure.

2. Eliminate storage silos for seamless operations

Data silos have long been the bane of IT teams. They fragment workflows, increase costs, and make it nearly impossible to gain a unified view of your data. With multidimensional scaling, businesses can consolidate their cloud storage into a single, unified platform that handles diverse workloads — from massive AI datasets to high-frequency transactional data.

For example, scalable throughput ensures high-definition video streaming platforms can deliver seamless content playback to millions of users without requiring separate systems for ingesting and delivering media. Meanwhile, scaling the number of supported applications means businesses can run multiple workloads — from data analytics to machine learning — on a single storage solution without bottlenecks. The result? A unified system that reduces complexity and operational overhead.

3. Minimize downtime through predictable scaling

Unplanned downtime is the enemy of productivity and customer satisfaction. Traditional storage systems, which often require manual intervention to expand capacity or support increased traffic, introduce risk every time they hit a limit. Multidimensional scaling sidesteps this issue by ensuring storage systems can grow seamlessly in all directions — whether it’s handling higher transaction rates, supporting more simultaneous users, or accommodating ever-growing datasets.

For example, consider an ecommerce platform during a peak shopping event like Black Friday. With the ability to scale in transactions per second, the platform avoids crippling bottlenecks, ensuring smooth and responsive experiences for millions of shoppers. Likewise, metadata scaling supports the explosion of individual product entries and customer profiles without degrading performance. By adopting a solution designed for such scenarios, businesses can keep operations running smoothly even under extreme demand.

The future of storage is multidimensional: Is your system ready to scale?

Storage may not always be in the spotlight, but it’s the foundation of a winning IT strategy. The ability to scale across all critical dimensions turns storage from a reactive, operational necessity into a powerful driver of growth. By eliminating silos, minimizing downtime, and future-proofing against uncertainty, businesses can unlock new opportunities and avoid the pitfalls of a rigid infrastructure.

The demands of AI, cloud computing, and media-rich workloads are accelerating — your storage must keep up. The organizations that adopt multidimensional scaling today will be the ones best equipped to thrive tomorrow and benefit from long-term sustainability.

So, how many dimensions can your storage system scale?

If you don’t know the answer, it’s time to find out.

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This article was produced as part of TechRadarPro's Expert Insights channel where we feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today. The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/news/submit-your-story-to-techradar-pro

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Getting an interview for a job can be exhilarating if you've spent a lot of time sending resumes and cover letters out, but that excitement is often matched by trepidation as you now have to convey why you're the one for a role to an actual human, whether in person or over a video call. But the days of manually hunting for the most common interview questions, awkwardly practicing in front of mirrors, and guilting friends and family into practicing may be over, thanks to ChatGPT.

I've used ChatGPT for everything from dinner ideas and children's entertainment to New Year's Resolutions and many other tasks. So, why not see what it can do for your job interview preparation?

Here are some of the best ways to use ChatGPT to help you nail that interview for a job.

Research

One of the first things you'll want to do is research the company you're interviewing for. Yes, you know enough about them to apply for the job, but more information is always a good idea. While that usually has meant filling tabs with articles and interviews bout a company, ChatGPT can streamline the whole thing by summarizing data in as much detail as you want. You can pull together the company's key values, recent news, and the competitive landscape for their industry into digestible nuggets.

For instance, you might prompt ChatGPT with "Give me a concise overview of Patagonia's mission and recent sustainability initiatives," or "Summarize recent developments at Airbnb relevant to a content strategist role."

Come up with questions

Next, consider what questions you might face. Think about your industry and role. Sure, you can resort to internet searches and write down questions in the same ballpark, but the more specific you are, the better you'll prepare. ChatGPT is great at zeroing in on hyper-specific questions if you let it.

For example, you could ask: "Give me interview questions commonly asked for UX design roles in tech startups," or "What kinds of strategic questions might come up during an interview for a product manager at Amazon?"

Instead of generic advice, ChatGPT provides nuanced, detailed lists of questions and can even ask you for more details as it puts together lists to practice with that are relevant to real-world scenarios you might face.

Mock Interviews

With all of this in place, you can start a major aspect of job interview prep with ChatGPT running mock interviews. Usually, you'd beg a friend or mentor to take pity on you and spend a half-hour pretending to be your future boss. The problem? Friends might go too easy on you (unhelpful) or overdo the tough-love approach (also unhelpful but emotionally scarring).

ChatGPT struck a comfortable middle ground, providing realistic questions without making me feel like I'd botched my entire career before it even started. If you want to try it, use a specific prompt for a company, like "Pretend you're interviewing me for a senior programming role at Spotify," or angle it for the kind of questions you might expect, like, "Give me a mock behavioral interview focusing on managing difficult colleagues."

Refine and improve

The mock interview doesn't mean your work is done. Answering questions confidently is one thing; answering them concisely and persuasively is another. Traditionally, refining your responses means scribbling notes and potentially becoming a flat-toned robot in what you say. ChatGPT offers a new way to improve your answers without losing your voice. Think about where your answers need aid and ask ChatGPT for help.

For example, you could prompt the AI with a lame answer like: "My biggest weakness is perfectionism," and then ask, "How can I answer this in a way that sounds genuine and less cliché?" Or you might request, "Make my answer about resolving a team conflict sound less defensive and more collaborative."

Interview AI

ChatGPT can be great for aiding in job interview preparation, but there are a few caveats worth mentioning. While impressive, it can't quite replicate human intuition or emotional intelligence. Sometimes, its suggestions may veer into overly robotic territory, so it might be better to think of its advice as a starting point rather than absolute truth.

Still, when so much is riding on a conversation, the more research, prep, and practice you can do, the better. ChatGPT might not guarantee your dream job, but it can at least help you feel confident and ready to convince the interviewer that you're the one they've been hunting for all this time.

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• Apple's new 13-inch MacBook Air with M4 starts at $999 or $1,199 for the 15-inch
• The previous-generation MacBook Air with M3 is discontinued
• The even earlier M2 MacBook Air, which previously started at $999, will live on via other retailers

New Apple devices typically mean the previous generation drops to a lower price point or is discontinued altogether. However, with the Mac lineup – especially the MacBook – since Apple Silicon hit the scene, some of the older models have a way of sticking around.

With the launch of the new 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air with M4, Apple is discontinuing the 13-inch and 15-inch M3 MacBook Air. Before the launch, there was some talk of the 13-inch version of that laptop sticking around, but Apple’s overall price decrease is causing waves as that model is discontinued.

Further, since the starting price of the 13-inch MacBook Air with M4 is $999 in the United States, Apple is taking the 13-inch MacBook Air with M2 off its virtual and physical store shelves.

But here’s where things get interesting. Like the M1 MacBook Air – which is still an incredible deal from retailers like Walmart – the M2 MacBook Air will be available at select authorized retailers – aka other purchasing channels – in select countries, including the United States.

Furthermore, it will be cheaper than the starting cost of the M4 MacBook Air.

(Image credit: Future / Lance Ulanoff)

This means you can get a modern MacBook Air design with M2 speeds and other tricks for an excellent price. You’ll just need to be okay with no Sky Blue, but hey, you can still get it in Space Gray.

In fact, as of this story publishing, Amazon in the United States has the 13-inch MacBook Air with M2 chip, 16GB of RAM, and 256GB of solid-state storage in Midnight for just $699 – a sweet 30% off the previous MSRP of $999. Plus, you’ll get free fast shipping if you're a Prime member.

If you need Starlight or Space Gray that same configuration is $799, which is still a deal but not as big of a discount. Similarly, the Silver version is a lot more expensive at $924, only an 8% discount.

While Apple hasn’t announced or confirmed the price of what the M2 MacBook Air will normally be at through these channels, the M1 MacBook Air can give us a good idea. Since its Walmart exclusivity, it’s regularly had a list price of $699 but is nearly always discounted additionally. Right now, in Silver, Space Gray, or Gold, it’s just $629 for the M1 chip, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of solid-state storage.

So if you don't need the latest chip from Apple, that fancy new shade of Sky Blue (though it is lovely), or a CenterStage capable camera, the M2 should definitely at least be considered. Especially since it comes standard with 16GB of RAM, which is a lot better than the previous 8GB.

You can see our review of the 13-inch MacBook Air with M2 here, and check out our first look at the new 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air with M4 here.

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OpenAI's release of GPT-4.5 for ChatGPT Plus subscribers this week had me immediately keen to try it out, though with some skepticism. There had been reports of OpenAI (and other developers) struggling to make the big improvements to their models we've seen before. And the current standard model GPT-4o, is pretty good in most cases. And if you want a comprehensive report, there's the Deep Research feature.

OpenAI claims that GPT-4.5 has a high emotional intelligence and nuanced understanding of what you say to it. The company's description painted a picture of both models as reliable friends, but that GPT-4.5 would be the one you'd expect a book of poetry from on your birthday. So, I decided to test 4.5 against 4o with a few prompts that any casual ChatGPT user might deploy.

AI poetry

(Image credit: ChatGPT Screenshots)

With that analogy in my head, I decided to start with a poetic challenge. I asked both models, "Can you write me a short poem about a rainy afternoon in New York City and make an image for it?" It seemed fair since looking out a rain-streaked window at a busy city can bring out the poet in most people.

GPT-4.5 is on the left and GPT-4o is on the right. They are amazingly similar. I personally think GPT-4.5 did a slightly better job with similar ideas. It's evocative of not just the look of rain but the feeling of gray skies, puddles, and traffic among the raindrops. In a blind test of three random friends, two out of three chose the same, with the third saying they just preferred the rhyme scheme of GPT-4o.

As for the images, both models used DALL-E 3, but GPT-4.5's looks a lot more realistic. I actually prefer the impressionistic lighting of GPT-4o's attempt, but both get the idea of the poem across pretty well.

Oscar insight

(Image credit: ChatGPT Screenshots)

With the recent Oscars, I went with a fun trivia question with a more complex, subjective follow-up: "Who won the Best Actress Oscar in 2023, and what made their performance stand out?"

Both had the right answer of Michelle Yeoh for "Everything Everywhere All at Once," but GPT-4.5 had a really nice explanation why her performance resonated with viewers. It covered her performance and mentioned how Yeoh was the first Asian to win that Oscar. GPT-4o's answer had a lot of the same beats, but it went with an odd essay and numbered list format that was kind of annoying to read when the question was a simple opinion request. GPT-4.5's answer felt more like how an actual human would answer, albeit one who is very into that movie and Yeoh as a performer.

Easy chef

(Image credit: ChatGPT Screenshots)

Finally, I put the models up against the eternal daily struggle with this prompt: "I'm bored of pasta. Can you suggest an easy dinner recipe that's different but not complicated?"

I don't know what kind of culinary inspiration I was expecting, but GPT-4.5 hit the nail on the head with honey garlic salmon with roasted broccoli. You can see it's a very simple, short recipe, and seems easy and quick to make. GPT-4o went with garlic shrimp and roasted vegetables. That's not a bad idea for a meal (though I personally would need to change the protein), but you can see the preparation alone takes multiple pans to prepare and the ingredient list couldn't even fit in the same space as the entire recipe from GPT-4.5. I asked for easy and not complicated, GPT-4.5 delivered that far better, I would say.

Deep thoughts

GPT 4.5 gives the vibe of recognizing the unstated preferences in a prompt compared to GPT-4o. But, it's very subtle in picking up on those emotional undertones. Without direct comparison, you might never know there's any difference.

GPT-4o is efficient, accurate, and practical in its responses, and its poetry is completely adequate. I wouldn't say those on the free tier using it are missing much from not having access to GPT-4.5, at least right now. Over time, that may change since GPT-4.5 is still a research preview and not fully complete and out. I'm going to keep experimenting with both and see if there are types of prompts where the new model is definitively better, but for now, I'd say don't worry too much about which model you employ, unless you're planning a meal and don't have a lot of time to prepare.

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• Micron PCIe 6.x SSD prototype shatters speed records with 27GB/s reads
• DesignCon 2025 showcases PCIe 6.x, but real-world use is years away
• GPUDirect Storage accelerates PCIe 6.x SSDs for next-gen computing demands

Micron has unveiled a new PCIe 6.x SSD prototype with a sequential read speed of 27GB/s.

Per AsteraLabs, that makes it the fastest SSD using PCIe 6.x in the world, surpassing Micron’s previous PCIe 6.x SSD, which was introduced last year and achieved speeds exceeding 26GB/s.

Showcased at DesignCon 2025, the Micron PCIe 6.x SSD was paired with Astera Labs’ Scorpio P-Series Fabric Switch, reaching a data transfer rate nearly twice as fast as the fastest PCIe 5.0 SSDs available today.

Breaking speed records with PCIe 6.x

The Scorpio P-Series switch, introduced in late 2024, played a key role in enabling this record-breaking performance. With 64 PCIe 6.x lanes and a four-port architecture, it provided the high-speed interconnectivity needed for seamless data flow between storage, processors, and GPUs.

The demonstration used NVIDIA’s Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage to establish a direct data path between the Micron SSDs and an NVIDIA H100 GPU, bypassing the CPU for faster and more efficient processing.

This setup showcased the potential of PCIe 6.x technology in accelerating AI tool and cloud storage workloads, where speed is critical.

With double the bandwidth of PCIe 5.0, PCIe 6.x delivers up to 256GB/s of bidirectional throughput on an x16 lane configuration, significantly reducing bottlenecks in AI training and inference tasks.

Hyperscale data centers will benefit from this leap in performance, but widespread adoption will depend on broader ecosystem support, including CPUs, GPUs, and network interfaces capable of fully utilizing PCIe 6.x capabilities.

Despite the excitement surrounding this breakthrough, the prototype SSD is just that, and it's unlikely that consumers or enterprise buyers will see PCIe 6.x storage solutions on the market anytime soon.

The ecosystem is still in its early stages, with manufacturers refining hardware and software to ensure compatibility and efficiency.

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