In my recent blog and video covering my predictions for infrastructure in 2018, I promised to return to the key themes, saying that I thought their simplicity could obfuscate their importance. So, here goes on adding a little more color to the first one.
The onward march from IT as infrastructure technology [back] to IT as information technology makes for memorable semantic fun…but it covers way more than that. Yes, it’s important to have IT focused on the overall delivery model, SLAs and – most important of all – the achievement of relevant business outcomes. However, the move of individual infrastructure elements somewhat out of the immediate spotlight and more into the (literal and figurative) IT shadows should never be interpreted as any lessening of the value associated with, or attributed to, these elements. Quite the reverse. As we increasingly rely on more integrated IT systems – convergence, cloud services, and software-defined being three common contemporary manifestations – so we inevitably also increasingly rely on those systems being “better.” In this context “better” does not necessarily mean things like price-performance – which remain nice-to-haves of course – but absolutely means things like reliability, ease of use, automation, and interoperability.