22/05/2020
Over the last few years, the IT Infrastructure management landscape has changed dramatically, having experienced significant disruption. This has been spurred mainly by the exponential growth of the cloud and the shift to hybrid IT, as well as the fact that business users want rapid solutions to issues, getting impatient when the network, infrastructure and application teams trade blames rather than seeking solutions.
Infrastructure management today involves taking control of the entire ecosystem. Regardless of the source of an issue – whether it be network-, infrastructure- or application-related – ready solutions to their problems and a reliable environment are all that business users want. Against this backdrop, here are some current trends in IT infrastructure management that are reshaping enterprises today.
A Top-down Approach to Troubleshooting and Problem-solving
In troubleshooting issues, infrastructure management teams often have a hard time identifying application performance challenges and pinpointing the source of specific problems faced by users. The best way to deal with the situation is to take an application-down approach – that is, troubleshooting from the application down to the infrastructure until the actual source of the issue is determined. This way, the teams pass through all the layers of the application and its infrastructure.
Because business users generally want a single point-of-contact, infrastructure management teams should be able to offer basic application support; even though this may not involve core activities such as debugging, they should be able to offer on-the-spot analysis and resolution. They should provide a seamless solution by teaming up with application management teams.
Flexible Infrastructure
Enterprises are massively adopting a hybrid cloud strategy, mixing on-premise data centers, private cloud, and public cloud, thus no longer limiting themselves to on-premise data centers. To allow holistic, end-to-end views of all these components, the overall management structure must change.
Infrastructure management teams must now look at their activities from the entire cloud perspective and not just from a data center point-of-view. Teams must now understand how these various infrastructure elements work together so that they are better prepared to ferret out the sources of specific issues and are better equipped to fix them.
Infrastructure management tools and platforms also need to support all the elements of the hybrid cloud as well. It has now become the responsibility of infrastructure management teams to solve problems in the cloud, instead of waiting for the cloud service provider’s attention. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to possess the relevant skills to support cloud services on all levels.
DevOps Agility in Infrastructure Management
Over time, DevOps has become the actual way of working and finding solutions for a plethora of issues. As DevOps replaces siloed work with agile work relationships between developers and operations teams, it becomes imperative for infrastructure management professionals to possess deep DevOps expertise.
Speed is critical, and teams must interact with developers to fix issues faster and create greater efficiency; however, the practical challenges of scaling DevOps must be dealt with. The skills needed must be made available at scale while ensuring that the teams do not duplicate efforts in similar ways, thereby creating inefficiencies.
The solution: Create a shared self-service platform that provides a toolbox of infrastructure management capabilities to help multiple DevOps teams. This shared self-service platform would enable DevOps teams to create, release, and manage products while ensuring efficiency and streamlining efforts at scale.
Software-Defined Networking (SDN)
Rapid scalability is particularly helpful when changes in demand affect network requirements. SDN enables this capability. Cloud-based networking improves performance and productivity by facilitating efficient network configurations and network management.
Cloud Adoption
To help companies overcome any apprehension about moving to the cloud, cloud service providers provide incremental technologies and purpose-built solutions. Managed cloud solutions are capable of delivering cloud monitoring, optimization, security, and resiliency.
Omnipresent Infrastructure, Distributed Data
In the world today, businesses locate IT infrastructure wherever they need it, which means that data is distributed. According to projections by Gartner, over 50% of enterprise data will be created and processed outside the cloud or data centers by 2020, compared to below 10% in 2019.
Infrastructure management teams will struggle to provide the requisite management and security if they do not plan for the attendant impacts of increasing data distribution.
Early on in the design stage of IT solutions, conduct an intensive, data-driven assessment of the solution’s impact on infrastructure. The evaluation must identify where data would be stored, how it would be used, and how its growth rate and other important factors could affect the infrastructure team’s ability to protect and manage it.
An Integrated Platform and Immersive Experience
Infrastructure management teams today have been heavily influenced by their exposure to the streamlined consumer technology offerings available and, as such, have much higher expectations of infrastructure management platforms. Value-add functionalities of yesteryears are now considered de rigueur. Customers now expect rapid feedback, seamless integration, and unprecedented levels of availability.
The Democratization of IT through Low- and No-Code Platforms
By utilizing low-code and no-code platforms, users can quickly and efficiently build applications without having to write much code, if at all. The goal is to enable “citizen development” and thus save time and resources. That being said, this poses the risk of increasing the complexity of the IT portfolio if the approach is poorly disciplined.
Infrastructure teams must exercise influence over projects that would affect them and the organization as a whole. Outrightly rejecting these platforms means that they risk alienating their customers but they must determine appropriate approaches beforehand. They must build governance and support offerings that make it easier for users though, not harder.
Although these are just some of the current trends in IT infrastructure management, they should give an idea of the emerging direction of infrastructure operations as a whole.
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