There has been a game-changing digital disruption in IT infrastructure and services that has forced technology leaders and executives to rethink the way they do business. In recent years, organizations have completely transformed the way they build, deploy, manage, and maintain mission-critical services in response to our new digitized world. Digitization has led to the creation of more innovative products and services, to consumers’ delight, that drives competition. With this, developers have adopted new, innovative technologies and practices, from the consumption of public cloud services, to the embrace of agile and DevOps for rapid software delivery, and beyond.
Historically, IT teams have ensured the availability and performance of an organization’s workloads by minimizing change and avoiding disruption. The goal hasn’t changed, though it is time for certain strategies to change with the modern demands of digital business. Now is the time for digital operations teams to take advantage of established and emerging technology trends that will continue to drive product momentum, deliver compelling customer experiences, and ensure your business’ long-term survival. So, how can you bring your IT infrastructure up to date in 2020 without missing a beat? It’s all about embracing the shifting landscape and focusing on the following key areas to scale up innovation and stay ahead of digital disruption:
- Embrace DevOps – The DevOps movement has ignited, calling for a new model of collaboration, trust, and accountability between your Development and Operations teams. This trend has already seen broad mainstream adoption, as it is key to minimizing friction and enabling business agility. It’s a practice that can essentially slash operational inefficiencies while helping IT operations stay relevant in this changing landscape. In order to keep pace, IT operations will need to combine their traditional focus on reliability, flexibility, security, and efficiency with greater emphasis on release velocity, continuous development, and the customer experience. By embracing these innovations, IT operations can support digital transformation initiatives and ensure that the new speed of DevOps doesn’t put your business at risk.
- Invest in Skills Development – With the changing landscape, IT decision makers are actually facing a looming skills crisis. They’re finding it more and more difficult to hire DevOps professionals, cloud native developers, and multi-cloud operators. Because of recent disruptive technology trends, IT operations teams have to constantly upgrade their skills in order to remain relevant or even just to maintain pace with the evolution of digitization. This means that CIOs and team leaders should be heavily invested in skills development programs that will both attract and retain employees. Continued learning is the only way to counteract the skills gap in such a competitive market.
- Organize Multi-Cloud Management – Most IT leaders use several different cloud providers as part of their enterprise cloud strategy. But, management of these different services across different platforms is no easy task. Your best execution strategy should involve picking the right cloud environment for a specific type of business workload. This will help your IT team optimize for both cost and performance. It’s all about understanding how to make the right trade-offs between cost, performance, and resilience for cloud services. So, you might consider experimenting with both open source and commercial monitoring tools. This will help multi-cloud operations better understand how each can drive real-time visibility and ensure faster incident response.
- Explore AIOps Initiatives – In 2020, incident management workflow will embrace the power of machine learning and data science, moving away from segregated, reactive strategies. It’s all about proactive and preventive incident management. Modern AIOps (artificial intelligence for IT operations) solutions can significantly reduce the human time spent on incident detection, first response, alert prioritization, and root cause analysis. Now is the time to explore these initiatives, and understand how machine learning-powered event management can change the way your business operates.
- Watch Evolving Data Centers – More and more, corporate data centers are taking on attributes of public cloud infrastructure with on-demand consumption and pay-per-use pricing models. Three trends that are a clear indication of data center evolution in the cloud era include the rise of Hybrid Cloud Models, Consumption-Based Infrastructure Models, and Write Once, Run Anywhere with Orchestration Engines. Data centers are primed for disruption, so IT teams should outsource the heavy lifting involved in designing, deploying, monitoring, and maintaining mission-critical infrastructure.
The evolution of the IT landscape will be constant, so in order for organizations to stay current and competitive, they’ll need to increase dynamic, innovative thinking in their quest to meet modern business demands.
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