Cascade effect management key for I&O teams in 2020

Managing flow-on effects of newly implemented technologies will be a key activity for infrastructure and operations (I&O) teams in 2020, according to Gartner. 

Cascade effect management was a major theme in Gartner’s top 10 trends impacting I&O next year — with teams expected to rethink their automation strategies, consider how hybrid IT affects disaster recovery and explore the best way to scale DevOps, the research company said. 

Currently, many automation investments are made without an overall strategy in mind, Gartner said. This can lead to tool and process duplication, as well as hidden cost cumulation which can prevent companies from scaling infrastructure in the way they expected, Gartner Senior Research Director Ross Winser said. As a result, Gartner believes I&O teams will need to develop or rethink an appropriate automation strategy. 

In fact, “We think that by 2025, top-performing leaders will have employed a dedicated role to steward automation forward and invest to build a proper automation strategy to get away from these ad hoc automation issues,” Winser said.

Winser also advocated that I&O teams rethink their disaster recovery plans to account for new hybridised infrastructures and evaluate resilience requirements at design stages, rather than years after deployment. Organisations may also look into hybrid digital infrastructure management to help deal with hybrid infrastructures’ scale and complexity, Gartner said.

In order to scale DevOps, Winser suggested organisations take on a ‘shared platform approach’ that allows product teams to “draw from an I&O digital toolbox of possibilities” and benefit from “high standards of governance and efficiency”. 

Data management plans will also become vital for protecting information and documents as they continue to grow in volume and distribution across a company, Gartner added.

The research company also hopes to see I&O teams become more involved in early-stage IoT and low-code planning and implementation to prevent service gaps appearing in future and ensure I&O teams are equipped to support low-code solutions. 

Other trends include movement toward distributed cloud; increased pressure on I&O teams to create fast, seamless customer experiences with zero downtime; and a need for cultural shifts to help network teams deal with risk avoidance, technical debt and vendor lock-in while allowing I&O teams keep up with changing technologies.  

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/Maksym Yemelyanov