7 hot infrastructure and operations trends — and 7 going cold

Change and stability are two competing challenges for IT teams. Everyone wants to trust their platforms, but they also crave endless improvements. The challenge is to deliver the new without sacrificing the rock-solid dependability businesses need.

Figuring out how to do this can be a battle between the belts-and-suspenders types who keep everything safe and the rebellious dreamers who want to innovate. A good IT team needs both roles.

The importance of this is greater than ever in the wake of a pandemic that has reinforced the vitality of IT. Businesses can’t function without a trustworthy digital network. But advances cannot be made to meet radically changing times without the ability to move fast and experiment.

Here are a number of ways IT’s use of infrastructure is adapting to ensure dependability and foster innovation. Some of these trends are driven by new innovations, some by pure economics, and some by political realities. All reflect the way IT infrastructure teams are pushed to provide more security and faster speeds without sacrificing stability.

Hot: Multicloud

The advantages of moving code out of the server room and into the cloud have long been recognized. A rented pool of machines maintained by someone else is ideal for intermittent computations and workloads that rise and fall. There will always be questions about trust and security, but cloud vendors have addressed these carefully with dedicated teams made possible with economies of scale.

If one cloud is a good idea, why not two or three or more? Supporting multiple clouds can take more work, but if your developers are careful in writing the code, they can remove the danger of vendor lock-in. And your accountants will appreciate the opportunity to benchmark your software in multiple clouds to figure out the cheapest providers for each workload.