Based on recent survey69% of boards responded to COVID-19 with digital business acceleration, while 60% chose to improve operational excellence through digital business.
I&O makes transformations that often take decades within weeks and months, allowing businesses to continue operating during downtime while growing a distributed business — one that utilizes digital skills to support mixed and remote employees, and provide services to consumers both remotely and in person. Distributed enterprise drives the need for computing that is available in more locations and environments than ever before.
I&O is now in a position to build on their outstanding achievements during the pandemic and capitalize on business leaders’ perception that IT is fundamental to their business. business, not just another cost center. As a result, they have to deal with chronic problems such as technical debt, underserved infrastructure services, and inadequate skills and resources.
Old technology, outdated processes, and fragile workflows certainly don’t help bring organizations to their desired future state of delivering computing platforms everywhere: On-site, off-site edge, in colocation facilities and in the cloud.
The following seven trends and technologies are expected to help organizations drive innovation in their computing infrastructure and achieve their desired future state.
Sustainable technology and energy efficiency
Organizations are being pushed by customers and investors to deliver sustainable solutions and technology is seen as critical, with the majority already investing in IT for their sustainability programmes. For I&O leaders, this means devising a strategy to reduce their organization’s carbon footprint (i.e. greenhouse gas emissions), water consumption, resource use, and electrical waste management. death in data centers.
By focusing the corporate focus on being purposeful by supporting a broader set of business and social goals — like sustainability — I&O is helping to build a growth trajectory strong on today’s market conditions.
Cloud sustainability, carbon footprint measurement and advanced grid management software are three emerging environmentally sustainable technologies that will soon be universally adopted within one to three years.
By 2025, 75% of I&O leaders will be tasked by senior management to contribute to corporate sustainability goals, and 25% will have indicators related to sustainable progress, especially on carbon neutrality.
Quantum Computation
While the true potential of quantum computing (QC) still a decade left, there is enough progress in the field to justify I&O’s discovery of quantum techniques for solving business problems. Quantum is another opportunity for I&O to be the hub of innovation rather than simply the maintainer of legacy systems.
I&O should focus on two specific areas in quantum:
- Develop your quantum computing skill set
- Enable business units, through quantum computing working groups, to centralize and centralize discovery investments
Gartner expects more than a third of large enterprises to launch quantum initiatives to build management skills ahead of QC opportunities in the next three years.
The development of early quantum computing initiatives will produce new QC champions who are equipped to navigate a rapidly growing quantum ecosystem. In fact, by 2025, 25% of large enterprises will provide an evolutionary advantage over their non-quantum-enabled peers through quantum-inspired initiatives.
SEE: Recruitment Toolkit: Database Engineer (TechRepublic Premium)
Artificial intelligence
As they move into the mainstream of computing infrastructure, high performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) are two newer areas that infrastructure teams must prioritize to ensure provides optimized computing infrastructure. Once seen as a requirement only for specialized needs, HPC is becoming part of the mainstream for many organizations. Similarly, the computing infrastructure for AI must become a core I&O capability. Due to the self-service nature of AI and HPC solutions, they are a powerful test bed for provisioning automation and provisioning immutable computing infrastructure.
I&O will use AI to drive efficiencies across other aspects of this roadmap. By leveraging AI for hyper-automation, I&O teams can be freed up to execute the innovation and accelerate the digital transformation needed to meet business needs.
In addition, building AI-generated digital computing and network infrastructure allows change events to be verified against a model of the current environment, making changes robust. and more reliable, while freeing up more I&O resources.
Immutable infrastructure
Immutable infrastructure is a process pattern that is never updated after the system and application infrastructure are deployed to production. Instead, when changes are needed, the infrastructure and applications are simply replaced from the development process.
Threats like ransomware create a need for infrastructure that is immutable for servers and network firmware. The result is an improved security posture with fewer vulnerabilities and faster remediation times as new issues are identified.
By providing base systems in an automated, immutable fashion, I&O can reassign any system so that it resembles its previous configuration and is guaranteed to be free of infection. This will drive requirements for the immutable storage of gold images and the processes required to keep these images up to date.
Confidential computers and secured systems
As data privacy and security requirements increase globally, I&O must incorporate the concepts of privacy and security into everything they do. All I&O staff will need a basic understanding of core security requirements and complete proficiency with technologies such as confidential computing, data protection running on third-party systems.
Confidential computing can reduce one of the major barriers to cloud adoption for highly regulated businesses or any organization that involves unauthorized third-party access to data. used in the public cloud.
It also enables a level of data security between competitors, data processors and data analysts that is difficult to achieve with traditional cryptographic methods. I&O staff who understand security systems that use cryptographic signing will be in a better position to ensure the firmware, monitor, and operating system are not compromised.
New system connection
AI and HPC will drive demand for higher performance accelerators and new memory and input/output (I/O) solutions. Over the next two years, PCIe 5.0 and Computer Express Link (CXL) will provide the opportunity to create new architectures for computing infrastructure, based on the switched PCIe 5.0 fabric. This is again a scenario where HPC and AI will be the testbed for these solutions, allowing I&O to assess capabilities and use cases for enterprise solutions.
SEE: The Microsoft Power Platform: What you need to know about it (free PDF) (TechRepublic)
Memory stratification
As CXL-connected memory becomes available, a cost-effective way of aggregating layers of different memory types such as DRAM, PMEM, and NVMe will be needed.
Memory hierarchical software will allow applications to explicitly access memory on multiple levels, with different performance characteristics, to enable cost-effective use of extremely large memory . I&O leaders should assess which computing platforms will benefit from such technology and how this can be done.
Taken together, these technologies will help I&O teams deliver computing platforms that include systems deployed everywhere and modernized legacy systems that can be integrated into a single system. Business design is composable. Business units will also consider the resilience of compute infrastructure a key differentiating factor, where I&O acts as an advisor to the business and is relied upon to build cost-effective strategies. charges and allows for quick recovery in the event of a failed operation.
Tony Harvey is senior research director at Gartner and covers a wide range of infrastructure topics.
