Top 5 Trends That are Likely to Affect Your IT Infrastructure in 2021

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic forced the entire world to shift to remote working as quickly and abruptly as possible in 2020.

With this transition occurring at a faster rate than what we’d have expected, it has hugely impacted and will continue to impact companies in various ways, from resource availability and IT support solutions to IT infrastructure and business operations.

Having said that, here are the top 5 trends which according to us every Infrastructure & Operations (I&O) manager needs to start implementing in the coming 12 to 18 months.

Let’s take a look at how the emerging trends are likely to influence your IT infrastructure.

Trend #1 – Conducting Business Operations from Anywhere Around the World

As per several studies conducted in the last quarter of 2020, it has been predicted that nearly 48% of businesses will continue working from home even in the post-pandemic era, compared to the 30% in pre-pandemic times.

This transition will, therefore, push your IT support executives to come up with a resilient yet flexible strategy that enables your employees to work efficiently from anywhere in the world. Plus, this will also provide your customers with 24/7 access to your in-house IT teams while allowing you to easily handle the deployment of your services across the IT infrastructure.

While the conventional processes within your I&O is what made your business fragile when it came to working remotely, the “anywhere operations” trend will enable you to transfer your staff and activate your operations wherever required.

This trend will also make way for your organisation to look for broader talent, as it’ll no longer be necessary to hire employees for a specific geographic location.

Trend #2 – Building an Optimal IT Infrastructure

The development of optimal IT infrastructure will mainly include creating a robust IT environment and data center. However, this could be a tad difficult to measure and further lead to intricate service deployments.

In order to build your case for a particular infrastructure deployment, your organisation needs to take up a business perspective and come up with various ways to optimise its business expenses while leveraging the right tools to get the job done.

Additionally, to conduct business operations from anywhere around the world, your organisation needs to build a programmable infrastructure.

In doing so, it’ll allow you to get the right work done in the right place and at the right time – all of which is the essence of your organisation’s optimal IT infrastructure.

Moreover, as your business’ “Infrastructure and Operations” transforms into “Integration and Operations”, you’ll have to implement various solutions like computational storage or hyperconverged infrastructure and match it with your optimal infrastructure.

Trend #3 – Ensuring Operational Continuity

With businesses continuing to work from home, it’s highly likely that your workload is also going to increase. This means, your business will have to offer additional support to the geographically spread employees and customers.

With that being the case, it only makes sense for you to offer continuous IT support services (irrespective of the external elements). Not only that, as a business, you also need to offer automated deployments that require minimal maintenance.

This is because, by 2025, it’s expected that nearly 60% of businesses will be leveraging automation tools to exploit the latest compute resources, offer exceptional agility and lower the overall deployment time.

Nonetheless, only when executed properly will this trend help you increase your business efficiency while enabling rapid deployment.

Here, the only downside will be the learning curve which comes alongside leveraging new, and at times intricate, processes or tools for operational continuity.

Trend # 4 – Maintaining and Modernising Core Operations

In order to ensure that your business’ IT infrastructure expands in lockstep, it’s extremely crucial to maintain and modernise your core operations. What’s more, you need to look at it as an ongoing process rather than a one-time thing.

You also need to make sure that you’re coordinating your infrastructure both on and off-premises so as to reduce the legacy drag.

Furthermore, by modernising your infrastructure, you’re not only lowering your technical debt but also paving way for a flexible IT environment which helps respond to your growing digital requirements in an efficient manner.

However, bear in mind that you need to implement this process alongside a realistic timeline.

Trend #5 – Distributing Cloud Resources

Last but not least, distributing cloud resources is another trend that’s increasing in popularity in 2021.

By doing so, you can ensure that the cloud is decentralised while taking off the burden of shifting your IT infrastructure to a cloud service provider. Taking up this approach will also allow agile location and offer latency reduction.

However, given that the market of distributed cloud is presently immature, its costs are likely to be high and the deployment models quite intricate.

It is, therefore, essential that you have distributed cloud resources on the horizon of your future cloud computing solutions. This is because cloud-based platforms can offer certain distributed services, which your business could leverage in the near future.

Conclusion

While these were our top 5 trends that are currently emerging in the market, this isn’t it!

There are more trends that are slowly cropping up and taking the limelight. This means, as a business owner, you need to stay vigilant and keep implementing trends as and when they occur.

Business Talk

View all posts