Only 3:04 minutes long

Transcript

Hi, I’m David Cappuccio.

Today, I want to touch on an interesting trend emerging in IT Operations: CIOs and CTOs are realizing the implications of creating an agile infrastructure.

Over the past few years the role of IT in supporting business has changed dramatically. The focus shifted from traditional on-premises computing to the idea that by also using Cloud and Edge topologies, IT could more quickly adapt to business needs. True enough – this happened, and businesses have become more agile, but the implications on IT Operations were profound. Here’s an example:

Cloud workloads are now mainstream. Not all workloads, but most new developments are cloud-ready and container-based, and most enterprises now support multi-cloud environments. This requires new tools, training, management processes, and policies for those developers and workloads.

On-premises workloads continue to expand—but often of a different type. These might be mission critical, require high availability or extreme low latency, or are workloads so tightly integrated (or data constrained) that they need to remain in a traditional data center, which continues to age.

Customer intimacy, especially in retail, is driving IT to move some workloads closer to the customer to reduce that latency and improve the overall customer experience – often to the benefit of brand awareness and corporate reputation.

Edge is an option for site-specific workloads (e.g., manufacturing), a means of pushing specific workloads to remote sites to support a distributed business or, in some cases, to support data location, sovereignty, or regional privacy requirements.

Work from anywhere—the COVID effect. During COVID, enterprises pivoted to a flexible work model, and the implications for endpoint allocation, network access, and application and cloud service provisioning are still being felt.

In most cases, this new, more complex operational paradigm has been successful. The issue IT Operations has found is not the complexity of this new world or which of the dozens of IT systems management tools to use, but rather how to take a higher level, integrated view of it all. And more importantly, how to introduce automated and continuously optimized processes that touch multiple technology silos as one.

This is Part One of a series of podcasts on agile infrastructure. If you found this topic thought-provoking and want to discuss its implications for your enterprise, please reach out to me via the DKG IT website’s contact form.

Until next time, this is David Cappuccio… always thinking.