Infrastructure Intelligence: 2020 technology trends

IT infrastructure intelligence: from multicloud to hybrid cloud

Infrastructure intelligence is not just holding data, it’s generating data – data that can be used to optimize infrastructure performance through automation.

While public cloud continues to grow, enterprise data centers still play a key role in most organizations for reasons such as data security and sovereignty, local data access, cost optimization and low latency requirements. Organizations are therefore prioritizing a balanced approach between on-premises and hosted private cloud infrastructure, and public cloud.

The reality of this hybrid cloud environment is that today’s data center is all about where the data is located – and data lives everywhere. It's therefore critical to gain visibility of your hybrid estate and understand the characteristics of the ideal deployment model for each workload.

And the infrastructure is doing more than simply making data available for applications – it’s also producing data that needs to be captured and analysed to improve performance and business outcomes. In this environment, artificial intelligence and machine learning meet operations, allowing the infrastructure to heal and improve itself through automation that’s based on data it generates.

Optimize lifecycle management in a hybrid cloud environment

Organizations will need the right tools, processes and skills to architect, migrate and manage the hybrid infrastructure that houses business applications. In addition, they'll need to define an approach to harness the data created by infrastructure intelligence, and access intelligence and possible opportunities in an agile environment, across multiple platforms. They’ll also need to address new security challenges – something we discuss further here, and in our piece on Intelligent Cybersecurity