Three unstoppable forces have generated very challenging crosscurrents that are disrupting or unsettling your clients’ IT operations.
How you help your clients navigate these crosscurrents will shape the future of their businesses:
One: Your clients Increasingly rely on standardized and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) IT services, applications, and systems as their IT infrastructures become more and more essential to their businesses’ ability to function — but these COTS offerings take them only part of the way to the business capabilities they need.
Two: New technologies— like serverless computing/function platform as a services (FPaaS), artificial intelligence/machine learning, edge computing, the internet of things, 5G wireless, and plenty more — are starting to create competitive pressures your clients simply can’t afford to ignore, but deploying these seems immensely daunting.
Three: Your clients’ IT staffs scramble to support ever-increasing numbers of shadow IT cloud services brought in ad hoc by line-of-business units with no thought to security risks, cost, or IT infrastructure upheaval.
IT infrastructure — no longer behind the scenes
Despite the chaotic conditions these three forces may spawn, they all point to the same truth: your clients’ IT infrastructures are no longer backend systems functioning behind the scenes.
Instead, to remain competitive, your clients’ IT infrastructures must focus on enabling their 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 or bust
Much of the work your clients face to stay competitive involves securely integrating the disparate elements of their IT infrastructure — its various services and systems, even its service level agreements (SLAs) — so those infrastructures can properly serve their businesses.
But unless they (and you) have plenty of IT and business expertise that’s both broad and deep, they (and you) will need expert help.
That’s because what’s involved ranges well beyond integrating, optimizing, and securing your clients’ existing infrastructures and their discrete services, processes (including monitoring and maintaining them), and SLAs.
It also involves incorporating the new technologies your clients’ businesses need in ways customized to their business requirements. It includes building and integrating the secure apps essential to their businesses and ensuring their networks can securely handle what’s in store. And that takes deep professional expertise.
The right technology consultant can help you help your clients figure all this out, then design and deploy the technology capabilities your clients’ businesses really need to power a new integration strategy that will keep them — and you — competitive.