If your business is like most, it’s being buffeted by three inexorable forces that have spawned very challenging crosscurrents.
One: You’re relying more heavily on standardized and off-the-shelf services, applications, and systems as your IT infrastructure becomes increasingly essential to the enterprise’s ability to function — but these take you only part of the way to the business capabilities you need.
Two: You see new technologies that you realize are starting to create competitive pressures you simply can’t afford to ignore — like serverless computing/function platform as a services (FPaaS), artificial intelligence/machine learning, edge computing, the internet of things, 5G wireless, and plenty more — but deployment seems immensely daunting.
Three: Your overtaxed IT staff scrambles to support an ever-increasing number of cloud services, more and more of them shadow IT brought in ad hoc by line-of-business units with no thought to the security risks they may pose or the costs of making them work with the rest of your IT infrastructure.
Resistance is futile — and will wreck your business
These forces all point to the same truth: your IT infrastructure and operations are no longer backend systems functioning behind the scenes.
Instead, if your business is to remain competitive, your IT infrastructure will have to focus on enabling your business strategy by effectively delivering services that respond to business needs and accomplish business goals.
This is why, within a few years, most industry sectors’ tech spending will be driven by business departments, not IT.
“The future of infrastructure is everywhere and anywhere,” commented one Gartner analyst recently, “and will be business-driven by nature.”
Infrastructure integration and beyond
Much of the work you face to stay competitive involves securely integrating the disparate elements of your IT infrastructure — its various services and systems — so they can properly serve your business and scale as much as necessary whenever necessary.
But unless you have a stable of IT and business expertise that’s both broad and deep, I urge you not to try accomplishing this without expert help.
That’s because what’s involved ranges well beyond integrating, optimizing, and securing your existing infrastructure and its discrete services and processes (including monitoring and maintaining them).
It also involves incorporating the new technologies your business needs in ways customized to your business requirements. It includes building and integrating the secure apps essential to your business and ensuring your network can securely handle what’s in store for it. And that takes deep professional expertise.
The right technology consultant can help you figure all this out, then design and deploy the technology capabilities your business really needs to power a digitization strategy that will keep you competitive.