The pandemic-triggered disruption has compelled businesses to think more carefully about their long-term IT strategies. IT decision-makers haven’t gotten enough sleep since the global health crisis. The traditional office as we know it has vanished, making way for the new ‘hybrid workplace.’
To facilitate a smooth transition to new working practices, IT leaders and CIOs must ensure that their IT infrastructure is flexible, dependable, secure, and future-ready. As stewards of IT infrastructure, they play a crucial role in ensuring that their diverse and dispersed employees and customers have excellent experiences with no significant snags in this rapidly evolving digital world.
Our recent CIO&Leader State of the Infra Management Survey reveals that enterprise IT decision-makers are considering significant investments in security solutions (33%) and services, Infra management tools (23%), public cloud (22%), virtualization/private cloud (20%), modernizing existing data centers (16%), networking solutions (14%), professional services for public cloud (14%) storage solutions (13%) and edge computing (11%), during the next twelve months.State of the Infra survey was conducted by CIO&Leader in April-May 2022. It attracted responses from more than 110 respondents.
Our research also found that IT decision-makers are under much pressure to meet changing customer demands, ensure network reliability for hybrid workspaces, avoid unplanned downtime, provide adequate storage, improve cybersecurity, and maintain service levels while reducing operational inefficiencies.
Overall, this month?s cover story looks at the top of enterprise IT leaders’ post-disruption agendas and their minds as they work to expand their software-defined capabilities, overcome substantial challenges, and focus on critical areas for accomplishing transformation by reinventing their IT infrastructure.
Real-time infra scaling
Nobody could have predicted that a pandemic-triggered health crisis would have disastrous ramifications on the entire world. Even in their disaster management plans, organizations had not listed pandemic as one of the probable causes of a disruption that would need them to take unprecedented business continuity precautions and move their entire workforce out of the office into a work-from-anywhere setting.
Adapting to a growing hybrid workforce and developing infrastructure for rapidly increasing online collaboration has put severe pressure on the IT infrastructure of almost every organization. CIOs and IT leaders strive for reduced latency by utilizing many data centers and edge points to bring data closer to their users.
“For us, scaling infra to match the dynamic demand during peak or seasonal passengers and Cargo loads and ability to onboard newer airports within a shorter deployment period to minimize lead times and maximize revenue is a key challenge. We are looking to address this challenge by auto-scaling, and load balancing Software-defined DC or Cloud Hosted workloads,” says Vinod Bhatt, CIO, Vistara.
Vistara is enhancing application availability by configuring SLA-based routing using SD-WAN and simplifying on-premise deployments that are data-intensive, requiring high-bandwidth, low latency, such as Flight Data Analytics Applications, leveraging AGS software.
Enterprises working closely with their software partners would predominantly focus on establishing business infrastructure requirements and ensuring that the proper software-defined elements are incorporated into their ecosystem to meet necessary storage and compute capacity in real-time. As we go along, organizations will strongly emphasize combining networking, storage, and computing into a single platform to build the necessary infrastructure to meet customers? changing expectations.
The growing appeal of hybrid cloud
Moving workloads to the cloud have become the topmost priority for all enterprises as it would help them rationalize expenses and fast-track their digital transformation goals. The hybrid cloud is gaining popularity because of its flexibility, scalability, and agility. According to the CIO&Leader Infra Management Survey, just about 6% of enterprises’ infrastructure currently comprises a hybrid cloud with legacy systems, whereas 20% have a hybrid with a predominantly private cloud and 31% have a hybrid with a primarily public cloud. 26% have a mix of public and private clouds, with some legacy systems, and 17% have a balanced blend of all three.
This essentially indicates the growing trend toward an as-a-service consumption model ? for everything from software to hardware. To secure business continuity and meet unique remote-work requirements, organizations are focusing on accelerating edge computing and distributed-enterprise network capabilities.
Many big companies are drifting away from their private data centers and moving their workloads to the public cloud. According to IDC, by 2026, 50% of organizations will use software and cloud-based infrastructures to create a 35% increase in sustainable efficiencies across workloads and datacenters.
The key drivers of the hybrid cloud adoption include the need to innovate and be competitive in different geographies, compliance, cost optimization, easy access to the latest technologies, and facilitation of application portability across all environments.
?Cloud infrastructure and hyper-scale architecture helped a lot during the pandemic. And that?s where you might have seen in the last two years, there are a good number of players entered into the cloud. However, the challenge was whether go for open-source or off-the-shelf proprietary cloud software for many years. However, with companies adopting remote and hybrid work models after the pandemic and user experience a priority, proliferation adoption of open-source software is seeing a tremendous uptake,? says Mahendra K Upadhyay, CIO, BARC India.
Besides reliable connectivity, effective, scalable infrastructure monitoring solutions are becoming more critical since they provide IT teams with a quick overview of preparing for and adapting to their unique IT infrastructure requirements.
Despite the many advantages of the hybrid cloud, it also introduces new issues, such as mindset and culture, security management, application readiness, interoperability, and vendor lock-in, which must be addressed first.
?An important consideration for successfully adopting hybrid cloud is orchestrating seamlessly across cloud environments and resources. This orchestration layer also needs to provide visibility, control, and governance for the end-to-end infra and application landscape and help optimize costs while proactively monitoring security and compliance requirements. It is also important that the futuristic architecture be agile in continuously modernizing the applications, making them cloud-native and using the new-age digital transformation tools like the advanced DevSecOps,? says Ashish Bhagat, Head-Digital Transformation, Sify Technologies.
Ashish further adds an inherent need to have an AI-enabled Cloud Ops Intelligence and an All-Ops platform that can seamlessly manage a multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud environment and continuously monitor the cloud consumption, security, compliance, application performance, and overall viability of the digital transformation pursuits.
Technology leaders are also planning significant investments in employing infrastructure-management solutions. This is to ensure that they track the health of their IT infrastructure and keep a check on the historical patterns, resources demand, and supply across data centers, at the edge, and in the cloud in real-time. Many of these tools leverage AI/ML-based technologies and enable enterprises to deploy predictive software maintenance to timely address the potential issues.
About every 3 in 4 respondents have presence in public cloud. Legacy still exists but is now minimal. Note that this survey was done among large and medium enterprises.
Source: State of the Infra survey by CIO&Leader, April-May 2022
Building digital resilience
The recent upheaval caused by prolonged lockdowns has pushed enterprises to focus on more robust risk management strategies to remain future-proof and manage newer risks and threats. During the pandemic, it became evident that the IT Infrastructure of many organizations was not equipped to deal with expanded and complex cyber threats.
Ransomware, phishing, and social engineering attacks increased dramatically during the epidemic. Identifying future risks and understanding their potential effects has become more important for technology leaders as businesses transfer their fundamental functions to the cloud. CIOs are still prioritizing the deployment of strict multi-factor authentication tools and securely configured cloud solutions.
At the pandemic’s start, the switch to remote work was massive in both pace and scope. COVID-19 was also deployed at high risk, according to the EY Global Information Security Survey 2021, with 81 percent of CEOs admitting it caused them to skip cybersecurity standards, including fundamental cybersecurity hygiene.
CISOs and CIOs are tasked with accelerating their digital transformation efforts and developing a well-defined strategy to protect mission-critical systems, meet compliance, and secure data. Despite many organizations showing confidence in their preparation for an attack, IT leaders fear that the situation [related to security] may deteriorate as businesses prepare for recovery and seek new ways to scale and thrive.
Our Infrastructure Management survey revealed that managing newer risks and threats is the top challenge for IT leaders and bolstering security architecture and investing in robust IT security tools is a top focus area for about 33% of organizations. Enterprises that have yet not incorporated security as a critical component of every transformational initiative are most vulnerable to new threat vectors and attacks.
IT Leaders stress on the importance of fostering a robust digital and cyber risk culture within the organization ecosystem to strengthen resiliency and prepare for any insider and outsider threat to their technology infrastructure. The main focus will be implementing the appropriate security and governance tools and techniques to ensure that the evolving digital infrastructure can support a broader range of workloads while increasing agility and confirming compliance/governance requirements.
Source: State of the Infra survey by CIO&Leader, April-May 2022
Hiring, talent upskilling, and reskilling
Most businesses face a fundamental difficulty in the post-disruption shift: developing a strategic roadmap around skill upgrades, identifying new growth areas, proactively educating staff, and establishing programs to build a future talent pipeline that can work in multidisciplinary teams.
According to the CIO&Leader IT Infrastructure Management Survey, One of the biggest stumbling blocks for IT leaders in driving their infrastructure management blueprints is a lack of cloud skills and capabilities.
With a diversified and dispersed workforce working in a hybrid environment from various locations and time zones, the new generation of talent requires a great and inspirational work environment.
According to McKinsey’s report titled ‘Six practical actions for building the cloud talent you need,’ firms with high cloud ambitions often lack the expertise or culture to assist them in traversing complex cloud economics, operating-model changes, and technological requirements required to realize cloud value. The skills needed to manage rapidly changing IT infrastructure differ significantly from what is taught in schools and universities. To develop resilient, scalable, and secure solutions, firms must establish solid reskilling and upskilling training programs.
Compared to the conventional IT architecture, managing cloud infrastructure needs automation at scale and well-defined processes/tools to ensure real-time collaboration between cross-functional teams.
McKinsey’s study adds that upgrading the developer experience should complement a mindset of shared responsibility. “Developers should understand that their objectives aren’t just to deliver new features but to do so securely and within regulatory bounds. They also need to understand the business context, the user personas, customer journeys (both current and future state), and product adoption so that the products and platforms they deliver support the organization’s broader digital strategy,” it says.
Most businesses face a fundamental difficulty in the post-disruption shift: developing a strategic roadmap around skill upgrades, identifying new growth areas, proactively educating staff, and establishing programs to engage and retain employees.
Managing multiple devices, tools, and integration
Businesses search for more agile and scalable cloud architectures to handle the demanding and growing workloads. While the hybrid cloud provides enormous agility, flexibility, security, and operational ease, many enterprises have struggled to integrate two independent ecosystems of on-premises and off-premises, cloud and non-cloud architectures.
For organizations, there has been growing stress on using various new tools and processes to properly run their systems in the hybrid multi-cloud ecosystem, responding to erratic demand from their users.
The organizational mindset shift and identifying relevant workloads for critical legacy workloads and hybrid architectures is a significant area of concern. The dependency on external cloud vendors is growing in the digital-first environment. Technology executives are searching for solutions that will allow them to provide reliable connectivity to a larger, scattered workforce while also providing real-time quality insights about diverse users specific to their business demands.
According to Mohan Malage, Head, IT Infra, Yes Bank, automation is no longer an option. It is a necessity, but the challenge also lies in the limited capability of individual tools. ?Only a few tools can meet the full range of compliance needs. So far, we’ve discovered that with the smaller set-up, maintaining required compliance was relatively simple, even with manual operations. But, as the number of critical security patches grows, our focus is shifting to putting the necessary technologies in place and connecting them to ensure we achieve compliance deadlines precisely through automation. Regulatory guidelines require us to release important updates at a specified time,” Malage explains.
Not so surprisingly, according to a recent Infra Survey carried out by CIO&Leader, formulating the right infrastructure strategy for the long term is a key focus area and challenge for about 22% of the surveyed IT Leaders.
To achieve business efficiency, technology leaders are increasingly looking at strengthening their next-generation capabilities, such as end-to-end automation and cloud. They are swiftly moving their infrastructure using SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS for accelerating workload deployment, minimizing costs, and achieving consistency across processes.
Dealing with growing technical debt
Many firms had to expedite their technology implementations during the pandemic to keep their operations running while staying on budget and schedule. They were running multiple generations of on-premise and cloud systems, many of which were outdated and needed maintenance. This created a problematic situation for technology leaders where critical technology updates and legacy system replacements have been outdated for far too long and may now be too costly to implement, risking the overall ROI and budgets and resources earmarked for innovation.
?We [IT Leaders] have to accept growing technical debt on hardware and software genuinely. The next step is to quantify the time and resources spent to fix the issue due to these technical debts. Further customer satisfaction also needs to be analyzed due to delays in fixing the issues. These problems have to be compared with the one-time additional time and resources spent during development to reduce this technical debt and, subsequently, faster fix ongoing issues and increase customer satisfaction. There is no shortcut to long-term success, and we need to build a culture of spending appropriate time and resources to minimize technical debt at the start itself, ? says Gaurav Midha, CISO, General Insurance Corporation of India (GIC).
Using consumer-grade WiFi equipment instead of business-grade network equipment, legacy router and switches, and obsolete servers are examples of technical debts that leave networks vulnerable to attacks and cripple businesses’ ability to run the latest technology processes and compete. Because of this technical debt, proving ROI can be difficult, which is a significant barrier for IT decision-makers in reimagining IT infrastructure. About 24% of the IT leaders respondents in the CIO&Leader IT Infra Survey cited demonstrating RoI/justifying new investments as their most prominent area of concern.
According to a McKinsey study, Tech debt: Reclaiming tech equity, the complications created by old and outdated systems can make integrating new products and capabilities prohibitively costly. ?Challenges hidden in the architecture can spring surprises that make projects run over budget and miss deadlines. Much of IT employees? time is spent managing complexity rather than thinking innovatively about the future. And disjointed data architectures prevent businesses from using advanced analytics to improve their decision making,? it says.
Research firm Gartner expects that this requirement will increase vendor merger and acquisition activity so that consolidation of tools could be possible. ?As I&O moves toward integration and operations, various management and monitoring tools need to be brought under one comprehensive tool to drive agility and business value better. For example, application performance monitoring, digital experience monitoring, IT service management, and artificial intelligence (AI) operations. A comprehensive management tool will reduce overall costs, produce better returns on investment, and drive I&O agility hyper-automation,? Gartner says in its 6 trends impacting infrastructure and operations for 2022.
A company with little or no technology debt can invest its energies and money into innovation and future-proofing business.
Arguably the most revealing finding of the survey are the investment plans in the next 12 months. While security is not that much a surprise, infra management tools is a huge priority investment area ? ahead of public cloud, virtualization, new hardware, and data center modernization. Along with the above finding, it just reaffirms that the CIOs and Infra Heads want to free themselves from managing operational complexities arising out of heterogenous systems and want to concentrate on management challenges.
Data storage and management
Data has become a critical component of today’s corporate strategy. Effective data strategy management must take advantage of future technologies like self-driving cars, wearable technology, and new business models like the sharing economy in the digital age. Enterprises need virtualization and automation capabilities across many administrative domains to manage the complicated processes required to evaluate this massive volume of data and exploit it effectively for particular business objectives. Furthermore, the data collection and analysis process must be made simple and efficient. For businesses, inadequate storage capacity and poor data management can be pretty costly.
CIOs and IT leaders heavily consider installing unified data platforms with a data pipeline that scrubs and cleans data before storing it in a ready-to-use manner with tags and catalogs for various users. Managing costs, meeting regulatory and compliance requirements, selecting the right technology, data collection, and data integrity, establishing a data governance structure, and a lack of data management skills are the key challenges businesses face when developing a solid data strategy. About 16% of the respondents in the CIO&Leader Infra Management survey cited
Managing data: storage, retrieval, and suitable access are significant challenges.
With most countries, including India, moving toward enhanced data privacy regulations, organizations also need to ensure a country-specific approach to collecting, storing and reporting data. There must be a judicial decision to support prevailing and emerging workloads with differing infrastructure requirements. The selection of supporting infra for any workload has to have a purpose and long-term vision. It has to be a healthy mix of on-premise, cloud, or colocation, automation, and integration.
To be relevant in current times, CIOs and IT leaders see it imperative to have a highly scalable, agile, available and secure IT Infra fully equipped to cater to ever-changing customer requirements. The focus is on having a great mix of the latest tools/technologies and supporting hardware infra. IT leaders need an innovative approach to adopting the right technologies and skilled resources with a long-term view of being the business driver rather than just a support system.