Gartner, Inc. highlighted the key technologies and trends that infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders must start preparing for to support digital infrastructure in 2019.
Gartner analysts presented the findings during the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations and Cloud Strategies Conference, which is taking place here through Thursday.
“More than ever, I&O is becoming increasingly involved in unprecedented areas of the modern day enterprise. The focus of I&O leaders is no longer to solely deliver technical services, but instead deliver services that support and enable an organization’s business strategy,” said Ross Winser, Senior Director, Analyst at Gartner,. “The question is already becoming ‘How can we use technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), the network or edge computing to support rapidly growing infrastructures and accomplish business needs?’”
During his presentation, Mr. Winser encouraged I&O leaders to prepare for the impacts of 10 key technologies and trends to support digital infrastructure in 2019. They are:
Serverless Computing
Serverless computing is an emerging software architecture pattern that promises to eliminate the need for infrastructure provisioning and management. I&O leaders need to adopt an application-centric approach to serverless computing, managing APIs and SLAs, rather than physical infrastructures. “The phrase 'serverless' is somewhat of a misnomer,” Mr. Winser said. “The truth is that servers still exist, but the service provider is responsible for all the underlying resources involved in provisioning and scaling a runtime environment.”
Serverless does not replace containers or VMs, but can assist with rapid scaling and granular billing. “This trend will become mainstream between 2020 and 2022. More than 20 percent of global enterprises will have deployed serverless computing technologies by 2020, which is an increase from fewer than 5 percent today,” he added.
AI Impacts
AI is climbing up the ranks in terms of the value it will serve I&O leaders who need to manage growing infrastructures without being able to grow their staff. AI has the potential to be organizationally transformational and is at the core of digital business, the impacts of which are already being felt within organizations. According to Gartner, global AI derived business value will reach nearly $3.9 trillion by 2022.
Network Agility (or lack of?)
The network is the hub of everything IT does - cloud services, IoT, edge services - and will continue to be moving forward. Network teams at any given organizations tend to work slowly to ensure their changes to the environment do not “break” or impact business operations, so the focus for 2019 and beyond becomes how an organization can perform network operations at a faster pace. “The answer,” Mr. Winser said, “is building network agility that relies on automation and orchestration, rather than manual inputs and monitoring.”
“As things like 5G, cloud maturity, and increase in endpoints will put a strain on the network and force them to grow, I&O leaders need to put network agility in place to effectively manage these escalating ‘things.’ The critical time frame for an organization to tap into network agility is now,” Mr. Winser said.
Death of the Data Center
Gartner predicts that by 2025, 80 percent of enterprises will migrate entirely away from on-premises data centers with the current trend of moving workloads to colocation, hosting and the cloud down their traditional data center.
“Data centers are usually amortized over a 10- to 15-year period, which makes them higher risk in a market that is rapidly adopting cloud. Edge and IoT are increasing moving workloads from a centralized to a distributed location, negating the need for some workloads to all be in the corporate data center, which makes the business case for further data center investment difficult to justify. Organizations need to create an environment that houses more agile infrastructure both on-premise and in the cloud, the critical time frame for which is 2021 to 2025,” Mr.Winser said.
Edge Computing
IoT and immersive technologies will drive more information processing to the edge, redefining and reshaping what I&O leaders will need to deploy and manage. The edge is the physical location where things and people connect with the networked digital world, and infrastructure will increasingly reach out to the edge. Edge computing is a part of a distributed computing topology where information processing is located close to the edge, which is where things and people produce or consume that information. It touches on the laws of physics, economy and land, all of which are contributing factors to how and when to use edge.
“This is another trend that does not replace the cloud, but augments it,” said Mr. Winser. “The critical time frame for organizations to adopt this trend is between 2020 and 2023.”
Digital Diversity Management
Digital diversity management is not about people, but rather about the discovery and maintenance of assets that are “out there” in any given modern digital enterprise. “Traditionally, asset management was based on licensing and software. While this is still important, it’s not as important as tracking the very assets that support the business that might have direct effects on the finances, health, and welfare of the organization’s customers,” Mr.Winser said.
New Roles Within I&O
I&O leaders find that staffing justifications require resolving complex relationships between costs, activities and customer quality expectations. Explaining I&O staffing requirements to IT and business leaders in terms of business value by connecting staffing levels to business performance and strategic objectives is a must in today’s modern digital enterprise.
“For instance, IT is increasingly taking on the role of supporting cloud services in terms of aggregation, customization, integration and governance. The biggest challenge with cloud services is its cost unless it is managed properly, which IT is being asked to do more often than not. As I&O staff starts to control an organization’s environments, they become a broker service rather than a seller of hardware or software,” Mr. Winser said. The critical time frame for this trend starts immediately in 2019.
Software as a Service (SaaS) Denial
SaaS is software that is owned, delivered and managed remotely by one or more providers. The provider delivers software based on one set of common code and data definitions that is consumed in a one-to-many model by all contracted customers at any time on a pay-for-use basis or as a subscription based on use metrics.
In 2019 and beyond, SaaS will have a big impact on how organizations look at infrastructure delivery strategies moving forward. However, most I&O leaders are still focused on IaaS and PaaS solutions. “SaaS itself is becoming a level of complexity that IT shops aren't yet coping with as they should. The shift to SaaS must be accompanied with I&O support. Staff needs to gain insight into SaaS from a compliance, data security threat protection, and enterprise integration perspective starting now through 2021,” Winser said.
Talent Management Becomes Critical
Historically, IT staff has been vertically organized based on the technology stack they managed. As infrastructures go digital, there becomes a need for people to work horizontally across stacks in order to identify and remediate technology work stoppages in their business. Expanding I&O skill sets, practices and procedures to accommodate hybrid operations is of the utmost importance in 2019 and beyond. “In short, talent will run the modern technology organization,” Mr. Winser said.
