Remote work and the shift to the cloud will continue to drive infrastructure trends over the next 12 to 18 months. By the end of 2023, more than 90% of infrastructure and operations (I&O) organizations will have the majority of their staff working remotely. COVID-19 may have accelerated this trend, but it is also the result of the changing nature of infrastructure led by the shift to cloud and edge.
Jeffrey Hewitt, Vice President of Research at Gartner, said: “Trends like anywhere operations and core modernization have been moving to the forefront of the I&O organization for years, but the pandemic rapidly accelerated them to the point where they’ll have a transformational impact in the near future,”
Hewitt pointed out the latest trends affecting I&O and put forward his own suggestions on how to best respond to these issues to achieve the best results in the post-epidemic era:
Trend No. 1: Anywhere Operations
Gartner anticipates that 48% of employees will continue to work from home, even after the coronavirus pandemic, compared with 30% pre-pandemic. That will force IT, executives, to develop flexible and resilient organizations that will enable their staff to work from anywhere, give customers everywhere access to services, and manage the deployment of business services across distributed infrastructures.
“The traditional, structured processes within I&O made organizations fragile when it comes to the flexibility of location,” Hewitt said. “Anywhere operations enable organizations to decentralize staff and activate operations where it makes business sense. It even makes way for broader talent choices as organizations do not need to necessarily recruit staff in a specific geography.”
Trend No. 2: Optimal Infrastructure
Optimal infrastructure will involve data center and edge infrastructure, which can be difficult to measure and can lead to complex deployments. Organizations should take a business viewpoint and look at how to optimize costs and how to use the right tools to build their case for given infrastructure deployment.
“The key for anywhere operations is developing programmable infrastructure that enables the right work in the right place at the right time—this is the crux of optimal infrastructure,” Hewitt said. “As infrastructure and operations evolve into integration and operations, various solutions such as hyper-converged infrastructure or computational storage must be matched with the optimal use case.”
Trend No. 3: Operational Continuity
Workloads will increasingly need to support geographically dispersed customers and employees. As a result, IT services must be continuous regardless of external factors, providing automated deployments and minimal-touch maintenance. By 2025, 60% of organizations will use automation tools to deploy new compute resources, reduce deployment time, and deliver greater agility.
“When done correctly, this trend increases efficiencies and allows for faster workload deployment,” Hewitt said. “The main downside is the learning curve that comes with using new and sometimes complex tools or processes that support continuity.”
Trend No. 4: Core Modernization
To make sure that enterprise infrastructure evolves in lockstep, maintaining core operations should be viewed as an ongoing process and not a one-time project. Enterprises will need to coordinate infrastructures on- and off-premises that minimize legacy drag.
“The upside of modernizing infrastructure is that it lowers technical debt and paves the way for agile infrastructure to respond to the growing list of digital business requirements,” Hewitt said. “Enterprises must implement a modernization plan with a realistic timeline, one which accounts for shifting skill requirements.”
Trend No. 5: Distributed Cloud
Another major need will be to distribute cloud resources so that the cloud becomes decentralized and the burden of support shifts to cloud service providers. This approach will enable flexible location and result in latency reduction.
“Since the distributed cloud market is currently immature, costs can be high and deployment models complex,” Hewitt said. “Organizations should still have it on their horizon as a part of the future of cloud computing since most cloud service platforms will provide at least some distributed cloud services that execute at the point of need over the next four years.”
Trend No. 6: Critical Skills vs. Critical Roles
By 2022, I&O leaders should expect to plan for at least 12 high-priority skills in their organizations. Leaders should hire for these skills now while the IT talent market remains a buyer’s market. But I&O leaders should also consider the fundamental cultural changes this trend will bring and plan accordingly.
“I&O skills requirements will continue to evolve as organizations adapt to new business environments,” Hewitt said. “Specifically, there is a shift in focus from infrastructure roles toward collective, critical skills. This challenges the traditional ‘territorial’ thinking of belonging to a specific infrastructure team and instead encourages collaboration.”
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