Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference 2024 Las Vegas: Day 3 Highlights

We are bringing you news and highlights from Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference, taking place this week in Las Vegas, Nevada. Below is a collection of the key announcements and insights coming out of the conference.

On Day 3 from the conference, we are highlighting the outlook for infrastructure and operations, edge computing use cases and top five steps to transform end-user services into a strategic digital workplace organization. Be sure to check this page throughout the day for updates.

• Gartner Identifies the Top Trends Impacting Infrastructure and Operations for 2025

Presented by Mark Margevicius, VP Analyst, Gartner

I&O leaders must work with other leaders, stakeholders and customers to understand the relative business value of the services their teams deliver today or could deliver going forward. In this session, Mark Margevicius, VP Analyst at Gartner, presented the key challenges impacting I&O and what leadership actions will generate success in 2025 and beyond. 

• “Over 200 I&O leaders told Gartner their top goals over the next 12 months are improving infrastructure resilience and quality while reducing costs and risks.”

• Challenge 1: Spiraling Technical Debt: “Leverage I&O’s technology visibility to encourage those outside your function to tackle their risky technical debt.”

• Challenge 2: Skill Proficiency Deficits: “Talent and technology roadmaps need to be more closely aligned. Start looking beyond technology to understand the businesses shifting skill requirements and what keeps your people’s hearts and minds engaged with these changes.”

• Challenge 3: Unpredictable Demand: “Adaptive governance is a flexible and dynamic approach to managing IT resources, policies, and processes that allows an organization to respond quickly and effectively to changing business needs, technological advancements, and external conditions.”

Presented by Thomas Bittman, Distinguished VP Analyst, Gartner

Edge computing is used very differently in different industries, with unique technologies and use cases, and many first-of-a-kind deployments. In this session, Thomas Bittman, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner, described the use cases, the patterns, and the learnings for edge computing.

• “Edge computing is highly diverse - different drivers, different industry-related requirements, different types of computing. This has led to a lot of custom one-off deployments. And they fail.”

• “One way to understand edge computing use cases is to understand the fundamental drivers. Why are we doing edge computing in the first place? Why not solve our problems in the data center, or in the cloud? There are four main drivers.“

• Driver one: Latency for requirements that require faster and/or more deterministic responses.

• Driver two: Data gravity where the mass of noisy data makes it too expensive to send the data elsewhere – better to bring some compute to the data.

• Driver three: Semi-autonomy when the edge needs to continue operating temporarily while disconnected.

• Driver four: Privacy/security when the raw data being collected is regulated, or highly intimate and being self-regulated to not leave a site.

Presented by Dan Wilson, VP Analyst, Gartner

Many infrastructure and operations leaders find it challenging to transform their end-user services teams to meet the demands of the modern workplace. In this session, Dan Wilson, VP Analyst at Gartner, discussed restructuring to effectively balance operational excellence, cybersecurity risk reduction and the rising focus on employee experience.

• “By 2028, end-user services leaders that have not started their roadmap to significantly increase maturity will be five times more likely to be replaced.”

• “The strategy must include input from a wide range of areas both inside and outside of IT. This ensures that the proper feedback has been gathered to represent the needs of all employees; it eliminates the tunnel vision sometimes associated with lower maturity organizations.”

• “Digital workplace organizations with employee-centric strategies achieve 49% higher maturity.”

• The five steps to transform end-user services include: nail the basics, a flexible strategy, modern organization design, focusing on DEX and leveraging partnerships.”

Journalists can receive additional information and/or request an interview with the Gartner expert by contacting Matt LoDolce at matt.lodolce@gartner.com.