Business and operations teams must deal with financial and political challenges as they move to support new technologies and workflows, according to a new Gartner study on four trends that will impact the cloud, data center and edge devices by 2023.
Gartner VP Analyst Paul Delory believes that external forces, not IT infrastructure, will be the biggest challenges facing organizations. The infrastructure and operations teams “will play an important role in supporting” its results, Delory said at Gartner’s recent conference on IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies, as reported in the company’s press release. This will be a year of “renovating, renovating, and renovating” infrastructure, he said.
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Trend 1: Cloud organizations will improve and restructure cloud infrastructure
Although public cloud adoption is widespread, many deployments are tentative and poorly implemented. To make the cloud more efficient, resilient and cost-effective, I&O teams need to reassess infrastructure that was quickly assembled or poorly built.
Refactoring cloud infrastructure should focus on cost optimization. This can be done through a number of steps that start with removing redundant, overbuilt or underutilized cloud infrastructure, and building business resilience instead of reducing workloads; using cloud infrastructure as a way to reduce supply chain disruptions; and infrastructure development.
The project will pay off: According to Gartner, 65% of subscription services will be excellent or ready to be deployed in the cloud by 2027, up from 45% in 2022.
Trend 2: New architecture will require new types of architecture
New and growing demands from new types of infrastructure – including data-intensive edge devices, non-x86 architectures for special workloads, serverless infrastructure and 5G mobile services – continually challenge I&O teams. Gartner predicts that 15% of manufacturing jobs will be in-house by 2026, up from 5% in 2022.
To prepare, I&O professionals must carefully evaluate alternatives, focusing on their own management skills, including and adapting in the face of time, skill and resource constraints. “Don’t go back to old methods or solutions because they worked well in the past,” advises Delory, as quoted in the press release. “Critical times are times to innovate and find new solutions to meet business needs.”
Scenario 3: Data center teams take cloud data on-premise
Data centers are shrinking as organizations turn to platform-based providers. Used in conjunction with new physical operating models, they can emulate cloud-like services with economic benefits for on-premises infrastructure.
According to Gartner, 35% of data center infrastructure will be managed from the cloud management plane by 2027, up from less than 10% in 2022. Three steps I&O professionals should focus on this year:
- Create a cloud infrastructure within the data center.
- Move the workload from your existing location to an associated location or edge.
- Or, embrace a more structured work model.
In an interview with TechRepublic, Delory said that eating-b
Data center pricing is becoming increasingly popular. “This allows you to pay for hardware on a regular basis, on a monthly basis. It makes the economy similar to cloud computing, and it means you don’t have to write a big check for all your hardware.”
All the major hardware vendors have pricing software now, and they encourage you to use it, he added.
Scenario 4: Organizations that make talent development a priority will succeed
A major barrier to innovation efforts is the lack of talent and every organization finds itself unable to hire external talent to fill skill gaps. Unless IT organizations prioritize the growth of natural resources, they will not succeed, the firm warns.
Workforce development should be a top priority for I&O leaders this year, Gartner said.
In addition, they should encourage I&O professionals to take on new roles such as responsible site engineers or subject matter experts for development and business teams. Gartner predicts that 60% of data center organizations will have virtualization and cloud computing capabilities by 2027, up from 30% in 2022.
Some IT advice related to cost, delivery and strategy
There are other options that IT organizations should take from a strategic and cost perspective, Delory said. Noting that the purchasing power of technology has shifted significantly to the commercial sector and that “IT is no longer a technology sales machine,” he said that the role of I & O teams is to work with technology buyers to help them make the right decisions about infrastructure.
“We’re transforming into internal consultants who help non-technical buyers make better technical decisions,” he said.
In terms of cost control, in the cloud, applications should be reconfigured to use cloud principles such as moving to serverless or serverless architectures instead of using virtual machines, he recommended.
“That’s how you get the most out of cloud computing and pay off your debt,” Delory said.
He also expressed pessimism about the food delivery system, saying disruptions continue due to the COVID-19 shutdown. “Some of our products look dangerous.”
For example, Gartner is seeing lead times for online devices that last 200 days, and in some cases, customers have reported delays of 400 days.
“This means that if you order new internet equipment today, you may not receive it in 2023,” Delory said. “Many organizations that expect to refresh the Internet this year may need to roll out those products for another year.”
Cloud-based and on-premise models are ways to reduce the complexity of delivery, Delory said. In the case of the cloud, energy management is the cloud vendor’s problem. In the utility model, products are shipped in bulk, so you don’t pay for them until you use them.
“A lot of IT shops are used to just-in-time ordering because it’s more efficient,” Delory said. “But in an era of mass disruption, just-in-time ordering may not work.”