Infrastructure and operations or I&O leaders are constantly challenged to deliver value while optimizing costs, a job that becomes even more difficult during tough economic times.

Cutting costs in response to the current economic turmoil will only get organizations so far and may create problems later. Organizations must make flexible medium- to long-term plans that can respond to changes in economic conditions. They must optimize costs and value, become smarter with resources and integrate the workforce and talent shortage created from the “Great Resignation.” They must balance investments targeted toward growth, focusing on digital business and efficiency.

I&O is in a unique position to lead the organization in going on the offensive in response to economic challenges. By focusing on workload orchestration, automation and collaborative practices to strengthen the organization’s resilience, I&O leaders can prepare the enterprise to not only survive through current economic turbulence, but also emerge in a better position to thrive amidst future uncertainty. To do so, I&O leaders should consider five Gartner predictions for the future of infrastructure, ensuring that current actions and strategies prepare them for I&O’s continued evolution.

Through 2025, 80% of operational tasks will require skills that less than half the workforce is trained in today.

The needs of business and information technology organizations will change radically in coming years. Trends and innovations such as hyperautomation, artificial intelligence and machine learning, advanced analytics, DevOps/DevSecOps, platform engineering, site reliability engineering and digital business will alter the types and quantities of skills required for. I&O professionals will increasingly need the ability to:

• Build and deliver products, rather than manage products.
• Implement platform engineering and drive the life cycle of platforms.
• Leverage analytics and machine learning for problem-solving, predicting impacts and correcting actions with optimal human interaction.
• Process value stream management skills to optimize flow and the benefits of automation activities.
• Apply organizational learning methods to accelerate the creation and transfer of knowledge, as well as retain and the “unlearn” deprecated approaches.

I&O leaders’ traditional methods of growing skills will be inadequate to address significant and rapid changes in technology and ways of working. I&O leaders must employ creative methods of acquiring and growing skills to meet future demand.

Explore strategies such as brokering resources from development teams, forward-filling skills as staff changes allow and partnering with the human resources department to foster an environment for internal learning. Create an I&O skills inventory by defining the necessary skills needed for legacy, current and future roles, then assessing staff. Implement a prioritized set of methods to change the portfolio of the I&O organization by creating a skills roadmap that emphasizes connected learning, digital dexterity, collaboration and problem solving.

By 2025, 95% of enterprises will fail to realize the full value of their DevOps/DevSecOps initiatives if they don’t adopt platform engineering approaches.

Organizations often struggle to scale DevOps initiatives. I&O leaders find it difficult to provide enough operations expertise within DevOps product teams as they grow, resulting in slower delivery cycles, software defects and frustration.

To drive long-term DevOps success, I&O leaders must appoint platform owners, use platform engineering and build self-service infrastructure capabilities that align with product team needs. A platform and product approach can enable businesses to respond faster to threats and opportunities while managing cost and risk. This model provides a foundation on which self-service, demand-driven platform products are built. Product teams can then focus on customer requirements, while platform teams can specialize in enabling platforms and products. Such an approach will support digital business growth and optimization.

By 2027, 75% of enterprises will combine their siloed automation initiatives to improve overall value, which is a significant increase from fewer than 10% in 2022.

A recent Gartner survey found that 85% of I&O leaders that do not currently have any full automation expect to become more automated in the next two to three years. I&O automation is a large market that’s only continuing to grow, yet many enterprises struggle with siloed “islands of automation,” which prevent cross-domain innovation and limit the value of connected automation.

With enterprises coming under increasing pressure to manage expenses due to economic uncertainty, maintaining these separate automation silos no longer makes sense from an innovation, value and support context. I&O leaders and business-oriented counterparts must work together to develop common business justification measures, automation use cases and best practices. I&O leaders can identify automation convergence opportunities to build a complementary vision and strategy. Inventory existing automation tools and platforms and de–duplicate the portfolio to realize short-term budget optimization. Invest in an automation community of practice to provide a collaborative forum for cross-enterprise automation.

Through 2027, 85% of workload placement decisions will need to be continually optimized because of changing product, availability and cost requirements.

I&O leaders face massive growth in the number of workload deployment options they are responsible for delivering and assuring. However, they often have limited visibility and input into deployment decisions, leading to inefficient, fragile and costly deployments. I&O leaders want to ensure that workload deployments are capable of meeting business expectations, but the rapid pace of change makes it difficult for them to do so.

A formal decision-making process for workload placement, which includes cost and value outcome as an integral decision point, is key. When this is combined with a reassessment process that validates placement decisions, it significantly helps the response to changing economic conditions. I&O should embrace the hybrid nature of deployments by developing a workload placement strategy that governs the selection of an optimal deployment option. Formalize decision making by continuously reassessing workload placement decisions, validating business outcomes against technical capabilities.

By 2027, 75% of enterprises will use site reliability engineering principles to optimize product design, cost and operations to meet customer expectations, which is a major increase from 10% today.

Business stakeholders are demanding high levels of availability, without considering product specifics, customer expectations, cost implications or associated trade-offs. I&O teams that focus on high-availability architectures without understanding product behavior or customer needs will overspend without reaching the desired outcomes.

I&O leaders can leverage SRE principles that focus on customer experience to optimize design, delivery and operating of complex systems to meet reliability and cost goals. Every product will have different customers and different requirements, requiring unique service-level objectives. With the SLO defined, the user experience can be effectively instrumented to demonstrate current performance against goals, enabling decision making about improvements or optimizations. This process allows optimized cost in many areas, such as architecture, operations support and disaster recovery, by focusing investments where they are needed.

Daniel Betts is senior director analyst at Gartner Inc. covering DevOps, DevOps tooling, platform engineering, DevSecOps, value stream management, site reliability engineering, infrastructure as code, continuous compliance automation, release orchestration and adaptive release management. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE. Betts and other Gartner analysts will discuss the latest I&O trends at the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference taking place Dec. 6-8 in Las Vegas.

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