One of the biggest misconceptions about the cloud is that it somehow makes the IT infrastructure less important. Nothing is farther from the truth. In fact, infrastructure is more critical than ever to business success. This is because technology itself has never played a greater role than today in helping businesses drive profitable growth, create innovative experiences and operate responsibly and sustainably. Infrastructure is the backbone of the modern “always” digital enterprise. As discussed in the Cloud Continuum Study, the cloud is no longer a single static destination, but an operating model for innovation across the continuum of functions and technologies, from the public cloud to smart devices to digital factories to connected vehicles.
Infrastructure is the establishment that permits companies to consistently work this endless expansion of capability. It gives the compute, arrange, working environment and database stage capabilities required to run the applications that run the business. Be that as it may, as the innovation proceeds to advance and accelerate—and the requests set on it proceed to grow—IT divisions are beneath ever-more-intense weight. Conventional approaches are progressively restricting their capacity to adjust, enhance and compete. What’s changed? The move to infrastructure-as-code is making gigantic unused openings for quick and dexterous development. At the same time, ventures are recognizing that “cloud” is not essentially a cruel open cloud.
Also consider the distributed nature of today’s workspaces and workloads. In the past, businesses typically had a limited number of sites and connections to worry about. Communication is needed everywhere right now, especially with the pandemic. For large global organizations, this can mean hundreds of thousands of new locations that require continuous cloud connectivity, dramatically increasing the demands on today’s networks. These networks must meet a wide range of rapidly changing business requirements and provide seamless and secure connectivity to data, applications and platforms.
The orchestration of IT infrastructure has become a much more complex environment. If you don’t rethink your architecture in this environment, you run the risk of creating a complex “spaghetti soup”. This can have dire consequences on the real world. In the worst case, cloud IT performance can be even worse. Despite the democratized innovations from world-leading infrastructure, high-value assets, and cloud providers, companies struggle to match the level of performance that organizations have achieved in their on-premises data centers. There is likely to be. Why? Infrastructure and processes, and the skills behind them, can’t keep up with new digital business requirements. This need to rebuild the cloud is why we are talking about the renaissance of infrastructure. And a new recognition of its importance to modern enterprises.
