You’d agree to this – IT infrastructure today is playing a critical role as a key enabler of business transformation. This has made the role of a CIO more significant than ever. CIOs are not only responsible for trimming costs and accelerating efficiency, but also to trigger business innovation within the organization.
Rapidly evolving digital technologies and increasing pressure to optimize operational efficiencies are driving businesses to rethink their traditional, linear IT models that manage the operations through manpower and static tools. This poses multiple operational challenges and shoots up administrative overheads.
With rising trends such as virtualization, SaaS and predictive analytics, revolutionizing the industry, managing and maintaining IT infrastructure is increasingly complicated for businesses that are stuck with linear models.
And, the challenges do not end here.
Today the way businesses utilize and process information, in the wake of various marketing, development and competitive contexts, has given rise to the need for a strategically planned infrastructure with robust abilities to handle big data. Manual efficiency just cannot match the pace of this development. And, this makes meeting the goal of reduced costs while powering digital maturity, an uphill battle for decision makers in 2017. The costs of network hardware and maintenance have a direct impact on this challenge. In a hurry to upgrade the infrastructure for handling more data complexities, companies often tend to cut down the network hardware and maintenance budgets. This premature upgrading of IT network infrastructure many a times results in incorrect assessment of maintenance contracts. Hence trends in IoT, Big Data, NFV and Hybrid IT will need smarter IT spending.
As we are already halfway through 2017, let’s look at some of the digital trends that are leading to IT infrastructure transformation.
Businesses need to consider these top trends in infrastructure technologies that can have maximum implications in today’s IT landscape.
As digital initiatives and technology evolve with every passing year, a robust and high-performing IT infrastructure is gaining more prominence than ever, since it has direct impact on the business outcomes – right from back-end capabilities and customer-centric utilities to employee skill development and BYOD phenomenon. Many enterprises have been outsourcing these projects for big bucks until a few years back. As digital technologies power the IT infrastructure transformation, companies need to reassess their current infrastructure model to reap benefits such as:
Enterprises will need to club their digital and physical operating environment to address the needs of businesses across the world. Managing solutions across multiple cloud environments from various vendors can give rise to severe operational issues that obstruct service delivery. Hence, having the right cloud management structure is critical to seamless operational environment. In 2017, more and more businesses will opt for interconnected fabric sheltered in carrier-neutral facilities, thereby enhancing the ability to track, manage and distribute workloads dynamically and binding different areas of the digital businesses.
Also, 2017 is an year where many technologies and processes are likely to become integrated. So it is important to motivate your teams to innovate and upskill themselves outside their area of expertise to deliver more value.
Last year witnessed a lot of buzz around software-defined networking (SDN) infrastructure technologies that powered increased data flow intelligence and automation to organizations. However, the requirement of replacing significant network size hindered end-to-end SDN implementations.
This year saw a shift of many enterprises moving to SDNs and NFV that aims to bring about a paradigm shift in the way the network operators design networks that can consolidate high volume servers, switches and storage, which are housed in data centers and end user premises. This implies that the network services that earlier used to run on dedicated hardware are virtualized by NFV. The software decoupling from the hardware helps in reallocating and sharing the infrastructure resources, thereby facilitating the deployment of new network services faster, over the same physical platform. NFV, thus, offers flexibility and dynamic scaling of the actual Virtual Network Function’s (VNF) performance to optimize the use of resources for the business quicker, cheaper and with finer granularity to realize better service agility.
Is it just another buzzword or does it really work?
Hybrid IT, is increasingly gaining momentum of acceptance. CIOs now face the big challenge of ensuring that the different components of the hybrid environment that work in sync and deliver a single integrated set of services.
The IT Trends Report 2016: The Hybrid IT Evolution report reveals that a large number of UK businesses have migrated from on-premises-only infrastructure to hybrid IT environments - environments that comprise mainframe and legacy systems, private clouds and hyperscale cloud providers (like AWS, Google and Microsoft).
It is important to understand that hybrid IT is not just a transitional strategy. It is often a planned and strategic business decision. According to the Peak 10 2017 Hybrid IT study, only 16% of businesses have a hybrid environment because of a transition.
Deployment of hybrid IT model lets you obtain capabilities from a number of sources – from your in-house IT department to SaaS applications and even cloud providers, who offer Infrastructure-as-a-Service. Bringing together these different services enables you to deliver an integrated, holistic digital experience to customers and employees. So it is recommended that you optimize the quantum of clouds and network you are using in your ecosystem, else you risk delivering a delightful customer experience. Also, it might help in mitigating cost overrun.
Internet of Things (IoT) will be huge, with 25 billion connected "things" by 2020, according to Gartner. IoT will become a $7 trillion business in the same year as predicted by the research firm IDC.
IoT can help companies across industries to utilize the insights from their application, infrastructure, systems and assets in advanced ways to offer new services that deliver additional revenue streams.
IoT applications span across industries – from wearables and healthcare to devices that monitor traffic and weather patterns. Deployment of sensors and the explosion of other intelligent devices have created a new market for Machine-to-Machine connectivity solutions. This advanced technology can play a vital role in deriving solid business value by powering effective communication between different elements of the architecture and actionable insights to enhance performance, reduce costs and adapt to the changing business landscape.
IoT is also powering the multiple updates of the rising number of AI and Analytics projects. It also helps businesses look for specific patterns that yield measurable business results. The higher and faster ROI it provides attracts attention of enterprises, globally.
However, the data loss and security threat loom large over the industry. Hence, delay in project implementation and the impact of IoT in the rest of 2017 may not be that huge as many had predicted at the start of the year.
Many enterprises today claim to be prepared for IoT and leverage the opportunities it offers, but only a small percentage of firms have the comprehensive capabilities to address the demands that result from the rise in the number of connected devices.
CSS Corp, a new age IT services and technology support company, is reshaping the IT infrastructure transformation landscape and turbocharges enterprise infrastructure ecosystem with its proprietary solutions and strong focus on analytics and intelligent automation. CSS Corp’s predictive operations and automation platforms assist businesses in simplifying complex IT operations and reimagining customer engagements. By integrating and leveraging the power of technologies such as Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Analytics, the company addresses specific customer requirements to create differentiated value for our customers.