As the pace of innovation in businesses get increasingly faster, IT departments are having to step up to do a lot more than what they were expected to do before. IT infrastructure management now means to actively take on the role of strategic deliverers of services and enablers of businesses by themselves. Business leaders, especially Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) leaders, must now strategize to build an agile infrastructure to facilitate global reach. This agile infrastructure must cater to the requirements of today’s mobile workforce and to the business need of quickly entering new markets. To achieve this, businesses must embrace new technologies like edge computing, IoT, automation, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and the ever-changing cloud marketplace.
Based on the recent trends driving this transformation in the infrastructure management sector, we’ve collated the decisive factors, strategic, tactical and operational, to help you get ahead of the curve:
Strategic:
- Geoplanning – Location is now a vital factor in planning workload performance, data security and infrastructure management. Businesses across the world are looking to implement geospecific workload planning. They are doing everything from basing planning on the services they need to deliver worldwide without latency, to ensuring data sovereignty with specific privacy and other regulatory controls on digital data based on the country from where the data originates. This is important for creating customer satisfaction by reducing help desk calls.
- The intelligent edge – With the increasing number of devices on enterprise networks, it is only understandable to shift computing power to the network edge to get closer to the where the devices are. It will also be wise to collect analytics from certain IoT-connected sensors to achieve intelligent edge in decision-making.
- Intent-based networking – With exploding amount of data flooding in from various sources, companies need more flexible infrastructure. Intent-based networking is based on intelligence, automation, and control from a software layer, which makes processes of continual re-evaluation more streamlined and business-goal oriented.
Tactical:
- The API-based economy – As IT managers move workloads to the cloud, application programing interfaces (APIs) enable workloads to move around more easily by simplifying the migrations between data centers, whether internal or external.
- Customer experience – While IT isn’t directly responsible for customer experience, it has to be ready to address latency and performance in the network so that customer experience doesn’t get affected in any way due to sudden glitches.
Operational:
- Data Center as a Service (DCaaS) – Since DCaaS is not just a cloud model but rather a strategic move to make your infrastructure more adaptive and agile, it needs to assess which workloads will work best on cloud and which won’t, how best to ensure security, and how varied technologies can be best aligned in a single environment.
- Cautious cloud adoption — Cloud providers are already creating incremental technologies to mitigate business’ apprehension about cloud migration and cloud services. Your IT should gradually prepare your workloads for the migration, so that the risk of complications in the process can be minimized.
In order to stay on top of IT infrastructure management solutions that would truly add value to the business, be particular about the following:
- Do not stick to the IT infrastructure management as you’ve known it till now. Extended IT model is the new normal.
- Do not think of your infrastructure management as simply support mechanisms. These are providing solutions that not only keep businesses running, but also prepare them for much required digital transformation.
- These services are based on ecosystem of partners/clients as much as they are based on business requirements. It is not advisable to do it all by yourself unless you have a massive budget.
- Focus on intent-based networking. While it is still in the exploratory stage, it will soon become the new foundation for tomorrow’s networking business as IT environments become more complex.
Your IT infrastructure must help enable you to take risks and innovate, besides becoming more agile, secure and service-oriented to deliver unified experiences. As you try to navigate this ever-changing world of multicloud, intelligent and mobility-driven environments, how strong would you rate your infrastructure management in light of this evolutionary shift happening in the scope of its services?
