Changing business needs driving new trends in data centers

Ramakanth Viewed 636 Times Viewed by 415 People

The lack of skilled IT workers is hurting the deployment of emerging technology, according to a new survey from Gartner. In areas from cloud to cybersecurity, this crisis is expected to last for years to come.

Emerging technologies and relentless businesses demands are pushing the limits of data centers causing them to undergo tremendous changes - but there are ways IT professionals can get ready to embrace the change.

Given below are the top 10 trends that according to Gartner underscore the intersection of cutting edge IT and business expectations:

Open development:  Open development is at the top of the best practices for horizontal application scaling. When a data center is built on open standards, it can be decoupled into its lowest level components. This flexibility, allows data centers to make the most out of innovations in both software and hardware fields that happen independent of each other.

Automation: So far, automation in data centers was deterministic (selected manual steps or processes are automated). It led to disconnected islands of automation. Realizing this, companies are now shifting to heuristic automation (automation based on human learning than on the process).

 

Software-defined data centers: In a software-defined data center, every piece of infrastructure is virtualized and delivered as a service.  This means that the hardware configuration is managed using intelligent software systems. A software defined data center provides increased levels of automation and flexibility that boosts business agility.

 

Big Data: Unstructured data and real-time input are disruptive changes in data centers. Building new data architectures to handle these disruptions is the need of the hour.

 

Internet of everything: Companies are recording actions of users on every Internet-connected device, creating large inventories of data. Enabled by big data analytics, businesses analyze this data to automate and refine their operations. The focus of data centers will shift to demand shaping and customer priority tiering.

 

Web-Scale IT: Business leaders across the world are shifting their attention to Web-scale IT. But, conventional hardware and software do not suit Web-scale IT. So, data centers will rely on software-defined everything and open philosophies to meet the expectations of their clients.

 

Mobility: Customers use same devices - mobile phones, laptops etc for both personal and work related activities. It is time businesses brought segregation in the data - personal and business data, isolated from each other on the same device.

 

Bimodal IT: Biomodal IT a combination of classic-style and modern IT practices. It allows data centers to safely introduce innovative new processes while maintaining traditional IT practices.

 

Business value dash boards:  Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) teams use business value dash boards to justify their expenditure and chart progress on corporate goals. Soon, a majority of I&O teams will use the dash boards for communication with the outside world too.  

 

Organizational disruption: IT systems and solutions that are built and used without formal approval from the company are called Shadow IT. Some IT companies are encouraging business user to set up Shadow IT projects and track their performance. It they succeed, the IT systems/solutions will be approved by the management to be used in the company. 

Comments:(0)