Mark Cleary, Senior Director Analyst, Gartner, supports the idea of turning digital disruption into infrastructure-led disruption as this leads to business value.
Infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders have a unique opportunity in deciding what role they will play when Digital Transformation takes place within the context of technology disruption: Move to the forefront of infrastructure-led disruption or remain custodians of legacy infrastructure.
Infrastructure-led disruption
“Infrastructure-led disruption leads to business value,” said Mark Cleary, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner. “The days of risk-averse cultures are being swept away as I&O leaders recognise the value of speed and agility in managing new technology, new ways of working and culture changes.”
Gartner predicts three things that will support infrastructure-led disruption and must be considered by I&O leaders to evolve for the future:
Traditional IT service management (ITSM) will be made redundant
Traditional I&O organisations are facing pressure to adopt agile practices to deliver greater value and better adhere to compliance frameworks. Current ITSM environments will face similar pressure to develop a more adaptable approach to delivering service, challenging the status quo of risk-averse and non-dynamic behaviour.
The one-size-fits-all philosophy regularly seen with ITSM, where every action is made to fit a fixed set of procedural steps regardless of business need, will no longer be acceptable.
Traditional ITSM teams that do not recognise or support these changes are likely to become redundant. The key is to redesign and optimise ITSM processes to be adaptable for different circumstances and meet key organisational objectives (e.g. improve the time to market, decrease cost of operation, and maintain stability and resilience).
Hybrid digital infrastructure management (HDIM) emerges
As the realities of hybrid digital infrastructures kick in, the scale and complexity of managing them is becoming a more pressing issue for IT leaders. External services from colocation, cloud providers, edge environments and the Internet of Things (IoT) are being added to the traditional data centre infrastructure.
HDIM addresses the key pain points of operational process, skills and tools that come with hybrid infrastructures. At present, the HDIM market is in the very early stages of development, but 20% of enterprises are expected to use HDIM tools to optimise workload placement by 2022.
Business leaders will increasingly rely on AIOps platforms for decision making
AIOps is gaining relevance within the enterprise to contextualise data coming from multiple sources but its technology is still emergent.
“Alongside improving I&O maturity and skills, data quality will become a major focus for the enterprise,” said Cleary. “Enable I&O teams to leverage cross-domain data through AIOps, including customer data that can be overlaid with data from other sources, to help identify factors pertinent to the business.”
