The 2020s, age of the digital business, and how I&O organizations will be in need of a solid team player to make sense of their expanding digital ecosystem.
A shiny new decade is a good time to take pause and reflect. The last 10 years were dizzying. The poster boy of the 2010s was most certainly the cloud. These were the heydays of digital transformation—a process by which rapidly evolving digital technologies were adopted to make the business more efficient and ensure constant IT service delivery. Managing hybrid IT became the standard reality. And then what? Where have we landed in 2020? Chances are you’re standing somewhere along the way to the never-ending journey towards modern IT. This post describes your new surroundings and lists how you can be prepared to sail through the 2020s with serenity.
The 2020s environment: A continuous digital journey
The new decade opens with an exciting concept: it’s not the IT (or the infrastructure) that counts, but the people that are enabled through it. Workflows will travel on a portfolio of interchangeable infrastructure types, flocking where the better business outcome can be attained, almost automatically.
In short, most organizations are becoming “digital businesses”, a term coined by Gartner to describe the “creation of new business designs by blurring the digital and physical worlds”.
6 signs you’re part of a digital business:
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- Quality and ease of experience are the ultimate goal of most innovation initiatives. No surprise here: It’s the experience that sells and brings in revenues.
- There is not a “destination” type of infrastructure to move to in order to become modern. Business innovation is thought out in terms of what constitutes the best infrastructure option. Cloud, virtual machines, containers, or physical, on-premise servers are all potential choices to support seamless workflows.
- The IT ecosystem is less and less vertical and compact, but a complex web of interconnected services. It tends to grow towards the edge so that services are delivered where they are needed.
- Managing IT requires advanced dashboarding and reporting capabilities. Enterprise IT is the playing ground of a larger group of external providers — which I&O must manage: cloud, IaaS, Paas, etc. More dashboards and reports are needed to “see” your entire ecosystem.
- The IT monitoring perimeter changes every minute. Connected objects are dotting the landscape — adding density to the web of connections supporting our everyday reality.
- You expect to integrate new, unfamiliar technologies, like tomorrow! Enterprises are preparing to acquire the computing and storage capacities to adopt AI technologies.
You’ve probably guessed it by now, after years of digital transformation we realize that the transformation itself was the acknowledgement that modern IT is a never-ending journey. Plus another inconvenient truth: IT complexity will be growing over the next decade, to support innovation initiatives.
“This is the new frontier for I&O: not thinking in terms of infrastructure type, i.e. cloud, data center, etc, but rather, in terms of the ultimate users that the infrastructure serves, and thus thinking of the innovation the infrastructure drives. The cloud is not a definitive solution and few expected on-premise servers to make a comeback at the edge. According to a recent Gartner presentation in London, by 2025, the portion of on-premise workloads that will not be going to the cloud will be going towards the edge — something like a 30% on premises, 30% at the edge and 40% in the cloud. Like an investor, you maintain an IT infrastructure portfolio to return the best outcomes in a future unknown.”
A relay race — people counting on you and you on a Smart Monitoring solution
One more thing on your surroundings for 2020. In a digital business, you are more accountable than ever to business teams. It’s because you now have a common focus on quality of service and customer intimacy and responsibility towards the performance of the business. Think of it like a relay race. No one wants to be the teammate that drops the baton.
3 ways you can be a reliable team player in 2020
- Be ready to monitor and see everything that contributes to moving essential workflows — not just the cloud: physical servers, containers, applications, IoT, POS terminals, phone or network switches… you name it. Don’t be stuck with a solution that’s overly specialized in one type of IT asset.
- With rapidly evolving IT ecosystems showing minute or major changes constantly, automate discovery and integration of new hosts and services.
- Prepare to answer on both performance issues and business KPIs. Make sure you have the means to collect and share relevant information in and outside of IT. Business teams need a different kind of reporting, one that shows the top-level view on availability and performance. You need to have some correlation capabilities here to turn your monitoring screens into business-friendly reports.
How Centreon is part of your journey in 2020
Needless to say, we’re passionate about the infrastructure that makes you and your organization perform. Infrastructure is the most direct route to customers and mastering it is the first stage of business performance.
That’s exactly why we have taken IT infrastructure monitoring to a new level, one that organically adapts to your own never-ending digital journey. Centreon is ready to support you no matter the direction you will be taking in building up the next layer of infrastructure to support innovation efforts in 2020 and beyond.
Smart Monitoring to the rescue
- Integration and automation
Whatever the newest hype, you’ll be able to integrate it in your monitoring perimeter, as you’re already enabled to monitor the cloud, containers, virtual machines, physical assets and IoT, even up to the newest acquisitions that relate to AI. No problem. You’ll also automatically find newly added services or hosts, noticing even the most minute change to your monitoring perimeter. You’ll be able to monitor and SEE everything.
- Mapping business processes
CIO and IT managers are increasingly taking a top-down approach, thinking first about business processes, followed by infrastructure and lastly the data source. With strong modelling capabilities in your ITIM solution, you can provide them with that view. When something goes wrong, it’s easy for you to connect with line of business owners and tell them what’s happening.
- Reporting
You’re expected to report more than just MTTR. And we can help you there, because with Centreon EMS you can easily create a complete family of dashboards and reports, with customizable views and metrics that show the top business-level view, allowing you to then drill down to the most minute aspects of the infrastructure. You have the view, you have the data, you can play with it to answer whatever request may come.
The 7 must-haves of a 2020s-ready ITIM solution
- Supports a Customer Experience (CX) focus.
- Provides visibility into many different managed services.
- Monitors the core, as well as the edge.
- Integrates IoT seamlessly.
- Automates service and hosts discovery and monitoring changes.
- Meets the criteria of business stakeholders for insights into the business-reliant processes.
- Supports and unifies distributed teams.
Seven is a lucky number. So is giving us a call to plan a lucky decade of I&O adventures.
Isn’t it exciting to see I&O becoming a cornerstone of the digital business, as an enabler of business performance? See how some I&O teams are rising up to the challenge or get in touch for a demo on how we can rise up to your ITIM challenges for 2020.
Cheers! Wishing you the best for 2020 and beyond.
Eryk Markiewicz
CMO, Centreon
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