Are you IN on the top five Infrastructure Trends?

Organizations nowadays are increasing including infrastructure and operations (I&O) in new and more areas in the enterprise. In fact, the corporate network infrastructure is increasingly becoming more and more evolved in the coming five years as automation, network challenges and hybrid cloud becomes intrinsically integral to the enterprise.

“There is a dramatic evolution of I&O happening right now, it’s no longer about hardware or software — it’s about delivering services that accomplish business needs. The future of infrastructure is everywhere and anywhere, and will be business-driven by nature.”

• Ross Winser, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, during Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations and Cloud Strategies Conference

Let’s look at the five infrastructure trends you should know about.

Trend #1: Put an Automation Strategy in Place

We have all come to accept in the past couple of years that many organizations today are automating to some level, primarily driven by their need to realign their manpower on higher-value tasks. As these needs pop up, so do vendors come up offering new automation options to enterprises to solve their immediate need. However, companies need to go from ad hoc to having a view of the proper automation strategy for their business and instead need to make automation investments with an overall automation strategy in mind which is holistic.

Trend #2: An updated DR (Disaster Recovery) Plan

We are all aware of how today’s infrastructure is spread across many places from colocation to on-premise data centers and even resting on to the cloud. This kind of an expansive hybrid infrastructure is bound to interfere with your existing disaster recovery plan.

This leaves organizations potentially exposed when their heritage DR plans designed for traditional systems have not been reviewed with new hybrid infrastructures in mind. Enterprises today need to leverage their automation investments and other IT tools to refocus on how systems are recovered. What’s important is that as an enterprise you must evaluate the agility and resilience requirements of your DR plan at the design stages instead of bolting it on as an afterthought.

Trend #3: Your Data is everywhere just like your Infrastructure

Gartner estimates that by 2022, 60% of enterprise IT infrastructures will focus on centers of data, not data centers. Prepare now to protect your data whether it’s stored on-prem, at the edge, or in the cloud. What’s important to start thinking today is How does IT manage data-everywhere scenarios? It is perhaps the right time to start investing in infrastructure tools to manage data wherever it resides and modernizing existing backup architectures to be able to protect data wherever it resides.

Trend #4: Involve IT with IoT

The issue in most organizations is that most IoT implementations are not driven by IT, but it is extremely important that I&O teams are on board with IoT implementations now before it grows hard to keep track of.  This will avoid the cascade effect of unforeseen service gaps, which could cause serious headaches in the future.

Trend #5: Scale your DevOps Agility

2020 is the year, where enterprises who are trying to scale DevOps need to find an efficient approach to succeed. The need of the hour is to adopt seamlessly to a shared self-service platform approach, as in failing to do so enterprises will simply fail to scale their DevOps initiatives.

According to Ross Winser, “Adopting a shared platform approach enables product teams to draw from an I&O digital toolbox of possibilities, all the while benefiting from high standards of governance and efficiency needed for scale.”

There are all kinds of other trends like hybrid digital infrastructure management, distributed cloud, and more in the Gartner report.  But we hope that these top 5 trends give you a head-start to prepare for some of the shifts you need to make in your infrastructure today.