Five Takeaways from the Gartner IO Conference

After spending last week in Las Vegas at the Gartner Infrastructure Operations and Cloud Strategy Conference – here are our five takeaways for IT Leaders.

1. Platform Engineering and Infrastructure Orchestration

We are firmly convinced that IT as a Service (ITaaS) is the ultimate goal for today’s IT Leaders. The idea of Platform Engineering and Orchestration aligns with the objective of creating internally available ‘consumable’ IT services. The infrastructure backend is any combination of a hybrid cloud with the front end designed and built for your organization’s IT consumption patterns and practices. The ‘stack’ is abstracted from the service requests and service provisioning. This standardizes and optimizes the ‘platform,’ which enables repeatability and, ultimately, automation.

Easier said than done, but it needs to be the directional ‘north star’ for IT Leaders.

The ‘rush to cloud’ that accelerated at the beginning of the pandemic has created costly and unanticipated service delivery structures. The common reaction in 2022 had been to gain visibility into all cloud costs and to plan, then execute on cost reduction/normalization strategies. The preferred approach in 2023 is to create visibility around value delivery and then optimize costs with an eye toward maintaining or improving the value delivery.

And socialize the value created and delivered.

In 2022, the worst ransomware variants infiltrated organizations and attacked the backups before hitting the production data and demanding ransom. When an organization turned to their backups, they found that there was no backup from which to recover. What was -- and still is -- required is anomaly detection with customizable filtering and thresholds, which helps organizations detect successful ransomware attacks in real-time, thereby enabling them to thwart the cybercriminals’ efforts, avoid paying ransom, and maintain uninterrupted operations.

Protect your backups and work to fully understand your attack surface and then execute on protection strategies.

Hybrid Cloud, Multi-Cloud, and Legacy Infrastructure combine with data sprawl to create complexities across the entire Infrastructure landscape. The goal is simplification, but effort alone will not get you there in 2023. Innovation in the creation of the abstraction layer(s) that will automate and orchestrate across hybrid environments is the magic wand next year. Pursue radical simplification while maintaining delivery of value and closing skills gaps to improve delivery and reduce costs.

Repeatable processes delivered via automation.

We are very close to ending the relevance of the terms ‘Cloud,’ and ‘On-Premise’ and ‘Security’ 2023 will be the gateway to the “Adaptable Data Center” as a commonplace term that refers to:

• ‘Data Center’ as a set of capabilities
  • Delivered via the most effective underlying technology and flexible/agile enough to effectively pivot between platforms based on business outcomes
• ‘Security’ as one of those capabilities identified in the first bullet point above
  • In 2023 Security is built in from the beginning to optimize risk management rather than applied later to mitigate risk and exposure areas
• Built and managed for Value Realization and Cost Optimization
  • Delivering the right compute-storage-network resources that are optimized for each workload