Five predictions on the future of infrastructure and operations

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.