10 Ways IT Can Get Ready for the Metaverse

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?

Hit the slide button and we shall see …