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This year’s Gartner Data Center, Infrastructure & Operations Management Conference that took place in Las Vegas on December 5-8, focused on evolving the role of infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals to Enable, Influence, Collaborate and Transform. As demands for innovation escalate and digital business evolves, so does the role of I&O professionals whose focus must be business first in an outside-in model, as opposed to an I&O or data center out to the business.
I&O or IT managers have long had a reputation of having “hard to deal with personalities” as well as never ending appetite to spend money on technology. IT managers have long struggled to communicate return on investments for technology upgrades. However, successful IT managers are the ones who can talk business first and provide a technology roadmap to achieve the desired results. In fact, Gartner predicts that “by 2020, 100% of the roles in IT will require intermediate level of proficiency in business acumen to effectively execute on the digital business strategy.”
What’s forcing many IT managers to evolve is the emergence of cloud computing providers who provide IT applications or services to anyone willing to pay for them – could be a company’s non-technical executive or line of business manager. This makes it tempting for business leaders to go around the IT managers, which is usually not a recipe for success. Smart companies will leverage the skills and experience of their IT staff to support the expansion into cloud services, to help develop business initiatives that are agile and scalable. A robust cloud strategy would include:
- Choosing the most appropriate cloud vendor
- Developing policies and practices
- Implementing cloud management
Schneider Electric’s mission is to simplify the way the world designs, builds and operates data centers. At the Gartner event, we were showcasing our prefabricated data centers, which building blocks for cloud data centers all over the world. We were also showcasing our Data Center Infrastructure Management products that simplify management of on-premise and cloud data centers and we hosted a panel of expert users who discussed this topic in detail.
It’s clear that cloud is having a profound effect on data centers, including in the requirements companies face for the “edge” data centers that connect users to all those cloud resources. To learn more about that issue, download the free Schneider Electric white paper, “Why Cloud Computing is Requiring us to Rethink Resiliency at the Edge.” You’ll learn how to determine the level of resiliency you should have in your edge data centers – to ensure your employees stay connected to the cloud resources they’ve come to rely on.
